Promoting trust, quality and data governance with Atlan
The Active Metadata Pioneers series features Atlan customers who have completed a thorough assessment of the Active Metadata Management market. Passing on what you’ve learned to another data leader is the true spirit of the Atlan community! They’re here to share their hard-earned insight into the evolving market, what makes up their modern data stack, innovative use cases for metadata, and more.
In this installment of the series, we meet Kenzo Zanzouri, technical management expert at Contentsquare, a leading digital experience analytics platform that provides rich context and insight into behavior, sentiment and intent at every touchpoint in the customer journey for over 1.3 million websites and apps. Kenza shares the history of Data Governance at Contentsquare, from its inception years ago, to using Atlan to support all BI products, support business ownership and improve compliance.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Could you tell us a little about yourself, your background and what drew you to Data & Analytics?
I started working with data about five years ago. I originally studied Political Science, but switched to data transformation during my Masters, which was a way for me to apply what I had learned in Legal & Compliance internships. I have taken many Analytics and Business Intelligence courses and decided to take an internship in Business Intelligence in the luxury fashion industry.
When you work on Business Intelligence, you touch a little bit of everything about data, including metadata and documentation, understanding how data flows and the systems involved, and the architecture. That’s when I realized that I don’t really like creating outputs for Business Intelligence, but I love all the data management around it. For someone young and junior in the industry, it was a great opportunity to learn, understand people in both the technical and business teams.
I was then hired at Contentsquare to build the Data Governance team. Back then, Data Governance was sitting on the BI team, and that was a great way to incubate that function because we were already part of a team that understood the business. Our vision was that Data Governance would always be cross-functional and that we would connect data engineers, BI analysts and business units. I learned a lot.
Recently Data Governance moved from the BI team to the Information Systems Department (ISD) and that is where I stand today. The work is now broader in scope, where I am not only looking at Data Governance. We’re rebuilding a lot of our systems, so we need to understand the architecture, how the data flows, who owns the data, and the quality of the data.
I spent almost three years at Contentsquare as a technical management expert. I still take care of Data Governance and I still work very closely with the BI team.
Could you describe Contentsquare?
Today, Contentsquare is a unicorn with a startup environment, with our main office in Paris and our second largest in New York. We are a SaaS company and our core product is helping our customers understand the behavior of visitors to their website and learn how they can improve their customer experience.
We are of course organized into different departments such as Marketing, Partnerships, R&D, Product Strategy and People. The ISD where I sit is under Finance.
Contentsquare has been around for almost 12 years and over the past months and years we have acquired two companies, Heap and Hotjar. We are merging these two entities into Contentsquare and have rebuilt and restructured many of our teams to ensure we sell a better product going forward. Outside of the Heap and Hotjar mergers, we’re working to build a single CRM and single ERP, so there’s a lot of rebuilding going on.
This whole rebuild is a big reason why Data Governance is so involved, with everyone from the BI team to our business units and all of our people, whether they’re operational or high up, are involved. It’s a great time for people to be here because it’s very rare to see so much change in society and it’s very rare to do it at this pace.
Why look for an Active Metadata Management solution? what was missing
I think every company, tech or not, understands that data is important. You need to understand how well your business is doing and you need to be performing well in general. But Contentsquare, like every other company, even when I worked in Retail Fashion, struggled with a lack of trust in data.
Why? Because as the company grows, you start getting more and more tools, the teams get bigger and then they split up. People tend to work in their silos and start generating data, then we don’t know what is being used and what is not being used. In addition, you have Business Intelligence teams that reach across departments to ensure that whatever KPIs and deliverables they have are credible and of good quality.
We didn’t have an information systems department back then, so you had a lot of systems and a lot of people who didn’t always work together, and no single, centralized place for information. So two or three years ago, when we were thinking about Atlan, we had some big questions about how the team could provide dashboards, extractions, or KPIs when we weren’t really sure about our formulas, where the data came from, or who owned it.
There have been cases where there was no expert to ask about the system and a business bought a product that was not well received but had great data. We wanted to use this data but weren’t sure what we were using or where it was coming from.
So that’s where Data Governance came in and that’s when I came with my manager to build our team.
But in Data Governance, you need active metadata, you need a way to manage ownership, you need to understand your data, and you need a system to centralize all the work. At that time we discussed what tool we wanted to use and Atlan was one of the best on the market.
We wanted something that everyone could use. It was very important to us not to use something too technical, because the more technical a tool is, the less likely a business will use it, and that’s not the direction we wanted to go. We didn’t want to assume that only data engineers and BI analysts would use it.
We needed something that was user-friendly, got great reception, and had a great customer success and support team. So we had a lot of demos back then and we chose Atlan as the best.
Could you describe Contentsquare’s journey with Atlan so far?
At the time, I think we wanted to implement Atlan too quickly, which was good in some ways, but we weren’t ready to get all 1,500 people at Contentsquare to embrace it. We needed to have something of value in Atlan that people would be interested in to avoid being pushed by our business units.
So our best adoption team was the BI team where all their output is now supported by Atlan. I believe this is the best way to get a business to adopt. It can be difficult for a business to adopt a new tool, but it’s much easier when they already have a way of working with technical people who already use Atlan.
I think our Data Governance team has grown and evolved and Atlan has grown and evolved alongside us. There are a lot of changes. Right now our priority is rebuilding our architecture and systems and things are on hold a bit, but Atlan is still being used for a lot of core work. If there are new KPIs or updates to our reports, we use Atlan.
What advice would you share with your colleagues considering Atlan for data management?
Now that I’ve been with the company for almost three years, I know our systems by heart, our data domains by heart, I know everyone and I know where we are. Now, I understand that a business doesn’t always know its data, and I think we could have moved a little more slowly at the beginning of our journey to really understand what data and systems were being used. Back then, when we didn’t have an information systems department, everything was a little more complicated.
Back then there was a lot of documentation and processes missing and we decided to skip some parts and jump right into Data Governance where we could spend a little more time understanding what we had and didn’t have, what we should map and so on before helping the business on their management journey. This includes Atlan as well as Monte Carlo where systems and data change and it can be hard to be sure what data quality rules to use.
I think the advice to myself, if I could go back, would be to spend more time understanding the architecture, the plan, and our data stack, and spend more time on the business. Even if the product is great, there are still people who will struggle to stop what they are doing to rebuild and move forward in a better way.
My second piece of advice, and I think I’m a bit mixed on this, is that we “hold the hand” of the business units and also try to make them more accountable. Because we were a new team, Data Governance was new and we wanted to do great things, we did too much for the company and they expected a lot from me and the team. So they never felt responsible enough for their data.
For me, the data is owned by the company. The systems may be owned by a central team, but the data must be owned by the business because at the end of the day they are responsible for who should have access to it, how it should be delivered, what it is used for and how it is calculated. When you do too much “handholding,” ownership is difficult and it will be even slower to move forward.
In general, I think take it slow. Data Governance means so much and nothing at the same time. There is a lot to do and it is better to divide the work and not try to do everything at once. You can’t work on your data, implement a data catalog, work on data quality, and manage compliance at the same time. That is not possible.
Finally, compliance should be a high priority. I think it gets sidetracked too easily when it should be one of the big arguments why everyone should use a data catalog. I think a lot of companies tend to put it aside because they think they’re tech-savvy and data is an area of expertise, but tomorrow if you’re going to be audited, it’s going to be very important.
This is one of the reasons why I try to push Data Governance as much as possible, not only through the business, but through anything related to R&D and product teams. Contentsquare has done a lot of work on this, and I’m very happy that we’ve been able to make people responsible for compliance in every department. We had data compliance ambassadors who worked directly with me and the legal team to work on a specific branch of governance.
At the time, it was great to have tools like Atlan because it made it easy to start things somewhere, see our data and label it. It’s one of the things I really like about Atlano.
Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash