In his years advising clients about data and analytics for management consulting firm McKinsey and Company, Sebastian Klapdor noticed a recurring challenge for enterprises. They struggled to scale the benefits of their data and analytics initiatives.
This is a profound problem. After all, you can’t become a data-driven organization if data is siloed, and insights are bottlenecked beyond the reach of decision-makers.
Speaking at Corinium’s CDAO Fall Boston summit last week, Sebastian Klapdor, Executive Vice President and Chief Data Officer for e-commerce marketing company Vistaprint, argued that switching to a data mesh architecture is essential to break through these barriers.
When Klapdor joined Vistaprint in November 2019, his vision was to transform the $1.5 billion USD company into one of the world's most iconic data and analytics-driven organizations. And while some have called data ‘the new oil’, Klapdor believes this is a poor analogy. After all, oil is difficult to extract, expensive to store and highly toxic. In Klapdor’s vision, data is more like water. Easy to store, available to everyone, and free-flowing.
“That again comes back to democratizing data ,” Klapdor said. "I want every decision-maker at Vistaprint to have the right information at the right point in time to make the right decision.”
When Klapdor joined Vistaprint, he observed many of the same architectural issues that had limited the impact of data and analytics for his former clients.
“The technology and the organization around it with respect to data at Vistaprint had clearly reached a ceiling; it did not scale anymore,” Klapdor recalled. “Why was that? It was because there was a central monolithic team working on monolithic hardware in a data center in a basement. So basically, velocity was zero.”
This centralized team was building tables on top of one another in an ever-growing pile. And because the team lacked domain-specific expertise, it was tough for them to answer questions from analysts about the context of any of the data. They had, in effect, created the mother of all data siloes.
What’s more, the whole operational model and mindset around data was highly centralized and unidirectional – the antithesis of a self-service model. You ask a question in an email, and we’ll send you a PowerPoint presentation.
Breaking down many of these structures would be essential if Klapdor was to realize his data-driven vision for Vistaprint.
Klapdor identified five core changes that he would need to make to ensure the benefits of data and analytics could be realized at scale and at speed across Vistaprint’s global footprint:
By making these five changes, Klapdor was able to put problem-solvers close to problems and data at the fingertips of decision-makers. The results for Vistaprint were transformative.
“[The teams] can move fast without being dependent on other teams ,” Klapdor said. "And the second big thing is that they are domain-oriented. They have all the context for their data and their business problem. So, they can build much better data products than a team that doesn't have that business context.”
Implementing a data mesh architecture requires a paradigm shift in thinking about data and analytics. Of course, changing the way people think is a real challenge.
“Data mesh is actually an architectural paradigm on how to organize data in your company ,” Klapdor said. "It is the distribution of data away from a central, monolithic team and monolithic units into data domains."
He continues: “Then, cross-functional data product teams build products for our stakeholders, who then use these products in a self-service way.”
For data leaders looking to get started on the road to data mesh, Klapdoor has five key pieces of advice:
Going forwards, Klapdor expects his cross-functional teams to produce more data products that will have a measurable impact on Vistaprint’s performance.
“I hope that, in a year from now, we'll have many more of these data products, at the scalable stage, but also many more on that overall landscape, driving more value for Vistaprint and our customers,” Klapdor concludes.