Data Strategies To Drive Business Value at Scale - Perspectives - ThoughtWorks

5/22/2021 Data strategies to drive business value at scale |Perspectives | ThoughtWorks
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Edition #15 | April 2021
Data strategies to drive business

value at scale
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to consent29
PUBLISHED toAPRIL
and you can change these or revoke your consent at
2021
When it comes to data, many businesses still su er a disconnect.

Consciousness of the potential value of data has never been higher, yet
enterprises still struggle to make the most of it. Companies have more tools
and capabilities at their disposal than ever, but can’t necessarily translate
information into commercial intelligence. Data is seen as a strategic
resource, but many organizations have yet to de ne a data strategy.
One recent Harvard Business Review study found barely a quarter of companies feel
they’re able to e ectively measure and report on the business value of their data
and analytics investments - despite 80% agreeing it’s important to do so. Research
into the issues facing CEOs by PwC also points to a signi cant gap between the
data business leaders know they need to make critical decisions, and the adequacy
of the data they actually get.
The data disconnect
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Source: PwC
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And with each year, it seems, the stakes get higher. “There’s a much stronger push
towards digitization and self-service capabilities that has been driven by the
pandemic,” says Emily Gorcenski, Principal Data Scientist and Head of Data,
Germany at ThoughtWorks. “Before, a lot of data analysis was done in hallways,
around water coolers and in morning meetings, so it was a lot easier to get feedback
on ideas and concepts.”
At the same time, Gorcenski adds, “conventional modes of data engineering and
data architecture have largely failed to deliver on the promises that were made
when the Big Data revolution happened. Part of the reason is that these centralized
structures simply don’t scale with the number of use cases. We’re not bound by our
imagination. We’re not limited by our ability to seek insight. We’re limited by our
ability to nd high quality data that we can trust.”
“Whether you’re looking at government or other services, the demand that people
are putting on their digital channels, and the data infrastructure that supports that,
has been rising exponentially,” agrees Prasanna Pendse, Head of Technology, India,
at ThoughtWorks. “It started even before the pandemic in the nancial services
industry, with more scrutiny of data governance, and the traceability of information
by regulators. People are seeing data capabilities aren’t scaling to what they need,
and realizing something needs to be xed.”
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A We
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use of to
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helpdemands
give you theisbest
also being driven
experience by one of the
on our website. most fundamental
technology shifts of our time - the rise of ‘coopetition,’ and business platforms
being drawn
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of cookies you would like
“As organizations are pulled into these ecosystems,

sharing data becomes more important, and difficult,
because they have to do it across trust boundaries.
Even managing your own data is a challenge, and now
you need solutions that go beyond the bounds of a
particular organization.”
Zhamak Dehghani
Director of Emerging Technologies, ThoughtWorks North America
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“We’re seeing
to consent this
to and youhyper-convergence,
can change these or revokewith the
your rapidatemergence of ecosystems in
consent
industries like healthcare - where COVID-19 has ushered in close collaborations
between providers,
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your browser andupdate
and then virtual healthcare
your cookie technologies,” says Zhamak
Dehghani, Director of Emerging Technologies, North America at ThoughtWorks. “As
organizations are pulled into these ecosystems, sharing data becomes more
important, and di cult, because they have to do it across trust boundaries. Even
managing your own data is a challenge, and now you need solutions that go beyond
the bounds of a particular organization.”
These pressures make it crucial to be able to rapidly access and experiment with a
critical mass of relevant and trustworthy data - a capability that most enterprises
still lack.
“For half a century we’ve been stuck in the bootstrapping phase of becoming data-
driven at scale - getting access to data at scale in the rst place to build data-
dependent solutions,” Dehghani notes. “I see it all the time at conferences - data
scientists, who are the prime users of the data, talking about this model or that
model, then ending their presentations by saying “but we don’t have access to the
data at scale.”
Enterprises are learning, in many cases the hard way, that “data itself has no value
besides what you can do with it, and what actions you can take from it,” Gorcenski
says. “Those decisions require people. Before the pandemic it was easy to shift that
role to a data analyst and let them come to you with those conclusions. But now
there’s much more of a need to have those insights at your ngertips with a self-
service capability.”
There is a clear path to capturing data’s full potential. But it requires a degree of
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technological
We use cookiesand organizational
to help give you the bestchange - and
experience also,
on our Gorcenski notes, a willingness to
website.
go where the data takes you.
“Data should challenge our assumptions and instincts from time to time,” she says.
“And
make if changes
it doesn’t, then
to your there’s
cookie something
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rst clear the
collect all this data if we’re just going to go with our gut anyway? We need to give
data
whatawe bitdoofwith
control over
your data andour
howdestinies, which can be scary - and if you don’t trust
to manage cookies.
your data you’ll never do that In order to trust your data you need a clear chain of
your data you ll never do that. In order to trust your data you need a clear chain of
responsibility showing who’s generating it, who’s processing it, what it means, where
it’s coming from, what it means historically and in the current context. All that is
necessary to get to a point where you allow data to make recommendations, and
drive decision-making.”
"Data should challenge our assumptions and instincts

from time to time. And if it doesn’t, then there’s
something wrong."
Emily Gorcenski
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Principal Data Scientist and Head of Data, ThoughtWorks Germany
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i. Data lakes everywhere (and not a drop to drink)
The failure to achieve this state of trust is rooted in data’s historical trajectory.
“We have to challenge this very fundamental assumption that for any company or
business unit to engage in data-driven experimentation they must have access to
centralized data to get any meaning out of it,” Dehghani says. “That paradigm has
become a blocker to scale in any meaningful way. which impacts how we build
organizations and teams, and leads to how technology has been built bottom-up.”
The bias towards centralization, in the form of data warehouses and later on data
lakes, means teams that are not intimately familiar with the data, its origin
No, manage cookiesor its
usage are centrally
In addition created
to the necessary and
cookies made
that responsible
help our for it. This leads to blockages
website function, and
some of the truthfulness of the data being ‘lost in translation.’
A typical data lake/organizational structure
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Source: Martin Fowler
Centralization in e ect divorces data from the operational units that often generate
it and need it the most. “The organizational structure leaves the data team sitting in
a corner,” says Pendse. “Yes, everything might ow through it, but from an
organizational perspective the teams are not particularly well-aligned with growth
priorities. Part of that is also the way these teams are de ned, as business
intelligence groups or something similar. This mindset is that of descriptive
analytics, which is ‘tell me what’s been happening.’ It’s di cult to shift to the
predictive, and eventually prescriptive, way of doing things.”
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"The organizational structure leaves the data team

sitting in a corner. Yes, everything might flow through
it, but from an organizational perspective the teams
are not particularly well-aligned with growth
priorities."
Prasanna Pendse
Head of Technology, ThoughtWorks India
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This operating model is also inherently in exible. “If you have one massive, central
data monolith, any change in how you work with it becomes a massive project in its
own right,” Gorcenski says. “Data is all about reacting to what’s happening in the
world. Your data’s going to change, and you want your data to change, you want new
customers and new markets, so you need to build a structure that is reactive to
change and adaptable. If you have new controls, it should be a minimal amount of
work to implement them.”
To move from ‘having’ data to using it as a basis for products, personalization and
better customer experience - freedom to experiment is essential. Monolithic data
architecture can make this a monumental task, extending the gap between theory
and action. “There’s a tooling aspect to it that dictates the cycle time it takes to make
decisions,” Pendse explains. “In a lot of traditional companies a single experiment
will take six months to run and is probably running only within a certain limited
area, not in parallel with other experiments.”
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ii. Shifting towards a mesh
The business case is clear: instead of creating lakes, or silos, organizations should
pursue a nimbler approach to data, bringing it closer to parts of the business where
it’s directly relevant.
This can be achieved by applying two core principles - domain-oriented data and
data as a product. Domain-oriented ownership and distribution breaks data
architecture down around individual functions while maintaining overarching
connectedness and integrity. Utilizing data as a product, and not just a resource,
becomes something that’s a pleasure to consume and use. These practices are the
basis of a data architecture designed for a resilient, and fast-acting, digital business:
Data Mesh.
Data mesh
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“Data Mesh looks at the root cause of the inability to use data at scale, and tries to
address it,” Dehghani explains. “For many years we’ve decided to decompose this
big problem of data into monolithic solutions and teams, within certain technical
boundaries, but haven’t been able to grow faster or scale out experimentation
quicker. Data Mesh learns from the operational world, where digital companies
have decomposed their business around domains, and continues that journey with
data, giving the control and sovereignty to the people who are best positioned to
generate and share it. It’s a natural progression.”
Data Mesh doesn’t necessarily mean centralized data repositories will disappear,
Gorcenski notes. “Data lakes and data warehouses will probably never truly go
away,” she says. “What is going to happen, and what the Data Mesh concept is all
about, is separating these concerns into domains. It’s up to the domain to decouple
the product and the infrastructure in a way that eliminates bottlenecks, but allows
you to create the data products that make sense. It’s not about creating one grand
model for how you access data, it’s about the principle of making it easy to get
access to data wherever it resides, and then building out your infrastructure to
support that.”
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"It’s not about creating one grand model for how you
access data, it’s about the principle of making it easy
to get access to data wherever it resides, and then
building out your infrastructure to support that ”

building out your infrastructure to support that.
Emily Gorcenski
A distributed approach has a number of built-in advantages. One is that it mitigates

the risk of keeping all your data in one basket, which can rapidly become a single
point of failure whenever it’s inundated with requests or subject to an attack.
“If you look at the defensive side of things where your servers are brought down
because of too much demand, actually your own success becomes bad news,”
Pendse points out. “Not only do you lose money that’s not coming in because the
door is shut, but it also opens up security vulnerabilities, which creates other risks.”
Distribution also naturally makes data more accessible by channelling it directly to

teams, “giving ownership to people that understand the data and are best
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positioned to control
We use cookies it,”you
to help give Dehghani explains.on“Of
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“Data as a product is very different from data as an

asset. What do you do with an asset? You collect and
hoard it. With a product it’s the other way around.
You share it and make the experience of that data
more delightful.”
Zhamak Dehghani
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Applying product thinking to data is key to making sure domain teams remain
connected, and incentivized to share. “Data as a product is very di erent from data
as an asset,” says Dehghani. “What do you do with an asset? You collect and hoard it.
With a product it’s the other way around. You share it and make the experience of
that data more delightful, and you want more customers.”
“In the typical model anyone who’s building a technology product is generating data
as a by-product,” adds Gorcenski. “We want to switch that around and really think of
data as a product at every stage of the way. When we’re driving deeper insights and
better data for our products, we can’t simply view data as an accumulation of
several little transactional bits. Data is no longer your system working when it takes
in inputs and emits outputs, but when it does that and generates data sets that
re ect the reality you’re seeing - and that you can use to generate feedback cycles
within the organization, to answer questions like: Are we selling the right things? Are
we reaching the right consumers? Are we making the right product with the right
levels of e ciency?”
Dehghani notes this requires the development of “self-serve” data infrastructure as

a platform, which transfers autonomy to domain teams and enables di erent ‘pools’
of data to be accessed and shared as required, in a secure, compliant and
distributed way.
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iii. Laying the technology foundation
A self-serve platform positions data to be put to immediate use, rather than

passively stored and accessed before undergoing other processes, as in a data lake.
“Modern platform architectures are very good at getting rid of a lot of the process
and noise that happens with data engineering, allowing us to get much closer to the
data and to get those insights out much faster,” Gorcenski explains. Such
architectures have proven a powerful enabler for enterprises that position teams to
access standardized data capabilities that can be assembled to create di erent
products.
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“Modern platform architectures are very good at

5/22/2021
Modern platform architectures are very good at
Data strategies to drive business value at scale |Perspectives | ThoughtWorks
getting rid of a lot of the process and noise that

happens with data engineering, allowing us to get
much closer to the data and to get those insights out
much faster.”
Emily Gorcenski
When developing a data platform, enterprises won’t always be starting from scratch.
Dehghani notes that existing cloud technologies can act as a “utility layer,” providing
the storage and streaming capabilities and standards upon which more mature
layers of the platform are built to support interactions with distributed architecture
and decentralized teams.
At most organizations, “the utility later is there, but it’s been built to assume data is
going to be centralized, and there’s a layer of technology that’s absent around the
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orchestration
We use cookies of the give
to help distribution
you the bestof data,” she
experience explains.
on our website. “If you decide to put
ownership of the data in the hands of di erent domains, not a central group of
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In a mesh “the technology isn’t vastly di erent, but how you manage and see data
will certainly change,” says Pendse.
Many organizations are still wedded to perceptions that storage is an expensive and
limited resource; that duplication must be avoided at all costs; and that creating a
new data repository is likely to be a two or three-year e ort. But advances in
infrastructure and practice mean in making data infrastructure decisions, these
should no longer be the enterprise’s primary concerns.
“The mindset has to shift to ask: What is the t for purpose mechanism to achieve
my objective, and how do I create it in a decoupled way so that I can optimize our
speed? With the infrastructure acceleration, tooling and automation that’s now
available, you’re able to spin out a new data domain, make it self-serve, even add
access controls and things like that quite quickly,” Pendse says. “The rst time
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iv. Aligning people and strategy
Data architecture can be complex, but the biggest bottlenecks on the road to
becoming more data-driven have less to do with technology or engineering than
culture and people.
“The truth is, people look at data and particularly data governance and their general
reaction is to groan,” Pendse says. “It’s seen as boring, something they have to
manage, a burden. Leaders may believe in it, but they can’t get buy-in from their
teams. These perceptions have to change, so people are interested, want to use and
consume the data, and are excited about the possibilities.”
“The truth is, people look at data and particularly

data governance and their general reaction
is to
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Ingroan. These
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these or revoke your consent at
Prasanna
cookies Pendse
from your browser and then update your cookie
To make that case, “a clear and comprehensive data strategy is the rst thing you
need to have in place,” says Gorcenski. “That needs to come through a culture of
evangelization of what data means and why it’s valuable to the organization,
whether it’s for regulatory reasons, process control, or aspirational, to create more
insights or build more products. It might come from the C-level but has to be
embraced by all the key players in the organization, right down to the people writing
the code.”
De ning the strategic purpose of data also makes it easy to decide what data and
related solutions to prioritize. “We always recommend working backwards - start
with your bets, your strategic goals as a company, turn those into actual use cases
and projects, and then identify the data products and datasets you need to unlock
those use cases - where they come from and which teams own them,” Dehghani
explains.
To encourage those teams to work with data in the right way, incentive structures
may also need to change to re ect the focus on data as a product, measuring the
value it is generating, or how often it’s consumed by end users, instead of how much
data is processed
We use orgive
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control, can cause
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but Dehghani
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“The
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where they’re
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make customers
to manage cookies.happy, or give people access to data,
consuming data from upstream sources who may not be motivated to make it
consuming data from upstream sources who may not be motivated to make it
meaningful or trustworthy. You can give them the tools to show they don’t have to
pave the path by themselves, and that they’ll be rewarded by the number of people
using data products. There are intrinsic incentives when these people realize the
power data has to optimize a business, product or application, to really embed
intelligence throughout the organization. That’s when they become part of the
solution.”
“You need to actually demonstrate bene t to people as you do this – it can’t just be a
forced approach,” agrees Pendse. “For example, at one bank where we put in an
access control system, there were worries everyone would be angry about it
because they no longer had as much access to data, or needed to get a request to
get it. But that ended up not being the case because the new system gave consistent
data, it was more responsive and didn’t go down like the old one did. People
gravitated towards the system because it worked.”
Gorcenski recommends testing new data models around individual departments or

domains, who can ne-tune the approach and eventually act as ‘ambassadors’ to the
rest of the enterprise.
“You need to start fairly small and pick the learnings, and have really close feedback
cycles to gure out what works and what needs to be adjusted,” she explains. “Give
those teams free rein to build things and to bypass the change management policies
that are in place. Then you need to look at the goals they’re accomplishing, whether
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they’re achieving them according to your strategy, and realizing the bene ts. Find
the
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and space to go make that change, and then promote within the organization.”
“You need to start fairly small and pick the learnings,

and have really close feedback cycles to figure out
what works and what needs to be adjusted. Find the
right people to be the champions, and empower them
by giving them the time and space to go make that
change, and then promote within the organization.”
Emily Gorcenski
v. Embedding security and governance
Allowing all this freedom may seem problematic, given business leaders remain
highly, and correctly, concerned about any potential weaknesses in data security
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and
Wegovernance. Decentralization
use cookies to help can be seen
give you the best experience aswebsite.
on our risky, because it removes a single
gateway or point of control.
Top data security concerns of CIOs/IT leaders
Source: Egnyte
But according to ThoughtWorks experts, distributing data closer to teams actually

has positive governance impacts. “In the traditional approach data governance
tooling, because of its centralized nature, has issues with data performance and
length of processes,” notes Pendse. “With a mesh, those go away and people feel
more productive. It enhances quality on the producer’s side by giving more granular
control to the people who are actually creating the data, who know it the best, so
the accuracy of how they tag that data goes up from the compliance perspective. It
also improves quality for consumers by giving them control over how they want to
consume the data, without having to doubt whether it is what it claims to be or
not.”
"A mesh enhances quality on the producer’s side by

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giving more granular control to the people who are
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actually creating the data, who know it the best, so
the accuracy of how they tag that data goes up from

the compliance perspective."
Prasanna
what we do withPendse
your data and how to manage cookies.

ead o ec o ogy, oug t o s da
Dehghani sees clear parallels with the security and governance approaches adopted
in moving computation from data centers to the cloud, where there is a transition
from perimeters and ‘walled gardens’ to zero-trust architecture in which everything
is essentially open, but every endpoint has built-in security, and the identity of every
actor is constantly veri ed.
“The same thing applies here,” she says. “In the past there’s been a single,
centralized body accountable for data being secure, available and modelled, and it
becomes this bureaucratic, rather dysfunctional unit that gets in the way of
innovation and isn’t really able to secure the data either. The inverted model of that
is that the governance function becomes a federation, because once you
decentralize the ownership, those owners have accountability in both executing
data management policies as well as contributing to what those policies are. At the
same time, it’s important that you also have elements of platform and automation
that are very, very powerful.”
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“Governance should be an enabling, not a restrictive force,” notes Gorcenski. “A lot
ofcontent.
companiesYou canview privacy,
decide compliance
which categories andyou
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would like
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having and what we’re preventing people
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from doing. We need to start from the idea that yes, compliance is a challenge, but
there
what are
we dogood tools
with your out
data there,
and how toand we cookies.
manage can architect our systems to be compliant
and to build trust which will then give our teams free rein to build better products
and to build trust, which will then give our teams free rein to build better products.
You need to train not just data people but everyone who works with data, to be able
to spot these issues and have a forum in which they can raise concerns and get
answers to things. Building a culture of data privacy within the organization is
crucial.”

“If your risk management strategy is just to never take on risk, sure, you might get
away with it,” she adds. “But you’re not going to innovate, and you’re not going to
recognize the value of your data.”
“If your risk management strategy is just to never

take on risk, sure, you might get away with it. But
you’re not going to innovate, and you’re not going to
recognize the value of your data.”
Emily Gorcenski
Principal Data Scientist and Head of Data, ThoughtWorks No,
Germany
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vi. Dealing with the data talent shortage
In implementing security and other policies around data, businesses often fret
about a shortage of expertise – and indeed studies show demand for data skills
continues to outstrip supply.
However as Gorcenski points out, companies are often “sitting on data talent that
they don’t realize they have” - people who may have a strong interest in data but
that have been prevented from interacting with systems or working with developers
because these tasks don’t fall under their formal role.
Biggest technology skills shortages for businesses
Source: Quanthub
“The Data Mesh concept is about federating responsibilities more into the domain
teams, letting people play in these sandbox environments, giving themcookies
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says. “You’lltobe
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Pendse notes e orts to train or reskill existing talent can often produce more return
on investment than racing to recruit new data specialists. “Data engineering is a

di erent mindset than application development, but it’s not impenetrable,” he
explains. “You just need some mentors to show you the ropes, go through some
training, make some mistakes and eventually you’ll get good at it. Training some of
the people who come in as application developers into the data engineering space
has worked for us.”
Similarly, data science “is not rocket science,” he adds. “We used to look for people
who had PhDs, but the building blocks of what you need to do at a skill set level
actually come from college-level math, so we’re looking at how to leverage fresh
graduates to go a little bit further.”
Ultimately, Dehghani is con dent that the development of data platforms will
disguise complexity to the point that the need for specialized data skills will be
reduced, while advances in data science will cut the amount of modelling that
companies need to do from scratch.
“There will be many reusable models that just need to be customized and tailored to
understand the data for your business. And if you have platform capabilities that
allow you to quickly train these models with di erent datasets and observe their
behavior, it becomes a general engineering practice, solved like any other
engineering problem,” she says. “This will enable advances in mobilizing a larger
population of engineers and practitioners, rather than trying to create more
specialized data
We use cookies scientists.
to help give you Without insulting
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website. I No,
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that even the
data engineer label disappears as more people develop data capabilities, with the
abstraction
content. You of
canaccidental
decide whichcomplexity enabling
categories of cookies you the up-
would likeand cross-skilling of a broader
section of the workforce. That’s the data platform, data rich paradigm.”
vii. Brace for brave new approaches
The emerging platform paradigm is far from the only reason for optimism about
how businesses will meet the data challenge in the future.
“There will be of course a bit of a battle between people that want to move towards
more democratized availability of technology and data, and the people that hold the
power right now,” Dehghani says. “But I’m already seeing the technical movements,
talking to di erent hardware providers about the next model of computing to suit
large sets of data that are dispersed. I'm very hopeful we will have a next generation
of technologies that really turns the data problem on its head and solves it very
di erently than we have in the past. The response of the industry has been
overwhelmingly positive in terms of Data Mesh and how enterprises can apply it.”
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"I'm very hopeful we will have a next generation of
technologies that really turns the data problem on its
head and solves it very differently than we have in
the past. The response of the industry has been
overwhelmingly positive in terms of Data Mesh and
how enterprises can apply it.”
Zhamak Dehghani
Hear more about this topic on our podcast.
Listen now
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According to Pendse, while the focus is often on software and services many of the
more exciting recent developments have been on the hardware side. “The whole
fabric of computing is changing, with t for purpose chip design,” he says. “Then
there are developments like non-wallet IO memory, which basically means if you
shut o your computer, your RAM doesn’t go away – persistent memory in other
words. What happens to the idea of a database if an application is persistent even
when the server shuts down?”

Gorcenski, meanwhile, sees massive potential in the vast amounts of data left
untapped in the Internet of Things (IoT) space – and in enterprises striving to do
genuinely new things with data, rather than emulating the approaches of luminaries
like Google or Facebook.
“We need to look at how to use data to disrupt our own industries, not to do what
Google is doing, but to do what nobody’s done before,” she says. “We need to stop
thinking of other businesses as living in di erent worlds and start to see them as
potential partners, nding ways to augment each other with data. Collaboration
creates a better business ecosystem than competition in many cases. Recognizing
those bene ts requires bold thinkers who are willing to do challenging and
complicated things and make that investment. It’s not going to happen in a quarter
orWe
a year, but ittocertainly
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help give you There are
the best experience more
on our unsolved
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there are solved

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Edition #15 | April 2021