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Lessons I Learned From Building Self-Service Data Platform
Is distributed data ownership right for your organisation?
What Is a Self-Service Data Platform?
You walk into your nearest supermarket, grab a basket, fill it with whatever you need, and walk to the checkout counter. You scan the barcodes of the items, pay, put them in your bag and leave the place—all of it without interacting with a single person in the supermarket.
Imagine that your business stakeholders are looking to answer a particular question. They bring their data into a data lake or a data warehouse, curate it, and create a BI report for it. Once again, doing this without depending on a team to enable them. Welcome to the self-service data platform — “A platform to enable stakeholders to ingest, curate, share and report on the data they own without relying on any other team.”
Traditionally, data platforms have been built, maintained, and iterated by central teams who manage both infrastructure and data. This creates a dependency and a perception of a bottleneck for new initiatives and requirements. To solve this challenge, a lot of organisations commenced on the path of distributed data ownership or, in simple words, multitenancy.
Each data owner is responsible for building, maintaining, and operating their data pipelines. The platform team will only be responsible for the underlying infrastructure and deliver new capabilities to make life easier for the data owners. Theoretically, this is a fantastic idea where you empower your end users to be self-dependent. In reality, it’s not all roses.
Top 4 Challenges of Self-Service Data Platform
Most of the challenges with self-service are not due to the underlying technology that pins the platform. Let’s discuss the noteworthy ones.
Senior management blessing
Moving to a self-service data platform is more a mindset shift than a technology change. Getting buy-in from your senior management is imperative to the success of your initiative. This helps steer the organisation and the use of data in the right direction.
