How Data Governance works at FOX

Mihir Modi

0:05 So I'm part of the business intelligence and the analytics strategy team. We started a journey, like little around like ten months before. We thought like, "Hey," you know, as other panel kind of, you know, mentioned, that we have data silo problem, nobody trusts your data, different data teams across Fox, you know, playing around with their own datasets, and difficult to find the data. So that's where we kind of, you know, thought to lay down our data strategy, and governance being the core component of it, basically, right?

0:31 So what we did was basically we started dividing our data into different logical domains, and then we thought of, you know, building a semantic layer on top of it, aligning with the data mesh principle, which we all kind of, you know, are embarked upon basically. Right, so that was kind of, you know, a key start. And I would say where we are at right now is basically... So that kind of, you know, prompted us to come up with the modern data catalog. That's where we started our journey with Atlan, searching around, "Hey, which is the best tool for us which will work both as a governance platform and, you know, primarily as a catalog?"

1:04 We started our journey, we started evaluating and, you know, we were looking for something different, right? At Fox, I would say there's always a culture wherein you are asked to challenge yourself and do something different, right? So it's the, the governance journey and strategy which we have laid out is not a typical journey. Like, you have a data council, you have, you know, a board of members, executive stakeholders from different business teams, then kind of, you know, implement. No, that wasn't the idea. The idea was to be nimble. The idea was to take an incremental approach and to go, you know, slowly across these domains, right?

1:39 So where we are at, like before six months, we launched, started launching our data catalog to different, you know, you know, our data team. That was our first kind of getting a feedback, "Hey, here are the top 10, you know, kind of data assets into the catalog which are most curated assets and which will answer your top 10 to 20 business questions," right? That's how we started, kind of, you know, slow. We exposed the catalog to the data teams, and now we are on a journey wherein we are you know, having sessions, having office hour sessions with different smaller business teams, targeting each individual business teams, explaining them that, "Hey, what's the importance of governance?

2:16 How this catalog can play a role? How can a producer and consumer, you know, personas kind of align with each other," right? That's how we have taken an incremental approach and going targeting small teams. And then the plan is to kind of eventually launch catalog across Fox. I would say so far the response has been fantastic. People are now kind of, you know, interested that, "Hey, here is a place where I can kind of look for, I can search, I can kind of discover, I, I can, you know, go to my BI dashboard."

2:43 So they're kind of excited, and yeah, that's the, you know, and we have to kind of, as, you know, Mark and other panelists kind of mentioned, it's a journey, it's a learning basically, so we're kind of gradually kind of always evolving basically and working around that modern data stack.