How data governance works at SMG Swiss Marketplace Group

Amy Raygada

0:05 Well, first, I'm a senior data product owner from the enablement team, data platform enablement team. But before that, actually, when I arrived to the company two years ago, we were just a central team with different business units, and we were basically chair resources for each of the business units. There was no governance, data quality was not a priority. We were just doing whatever business was asking for. It was a little bit of a mess. Then we went through a merger because the company absorbed one... The other company.

0:36 And basically, I joined when we were dividing this into these separate business units, each ones with their own separate data team, and us, the central team that in theory, you know, will be, like, giving all the best practices, right all the important things that the the, in general, the company should, you know, follow. However, this was more complicated than expected because the maturity level of each of the business unit was very different. And also, each business unit, as I mentioned, they have their own data director, so they have their own vision, their own ways of working.

1:14 And of course, the central team trying to make them work in the same data platforms, for example, or same structure, it was not an option, you know. So we got a lot of resistance out of it. We started thinking data governance more with the data mesh concept at the very beginning. And we started to implement this last September, actually, from one year ago approximately. We hire an architect. In May last year, we started to think about what kind of use cases we can use, you know, in order to be able to implement all this.

1:49 With our architect we were able to have quickly, you know, all the data platform, all the access control side, monitoring and, you know, these kind of topics that you actually need. And of course, implementing, you know, all, all these other tools that probably we'll speak further. So now I think it's much better one year and a half later, but it's still a lot of gaps. Right now we are implementing data owners.

2:15 We want actually the people to own it, to be able to understand that it's not only responsibility of the data team to take care of the data, of the quality, and how you dispose out of it as well, you know, regarding data privacy and all these topics. But also, you know, it's a hard topic because not everyone wants to be responsible from this. So I will say it's getting better.

2:36 And now we got support from the C-level, which is something very important to start your data governance journey, I will say, because we started, you know, bottom up instead of top bottom, just to show something, a business case that will actually get supported by the top level. And I think now things are gonna move a bit quicker. But we moved from nothing to have some owners, to have Atlan as a data catalog, to have a modern data stack, a data platform, and eventually we would like to reunify all the data platforms that we have because, as I mentioned, they are different.

3:08 But yeah, it's a tough journey, but we have done quite of a big progress by now.