--- title: "Modern Data Team Awards: Meet Data Visionaries of 2023" url: "https://atlan.com/modern-data-team-awards/" description: "Meet the innovative data teams and professionals honored in the 2023 Modern Data Team Awards. Learn how these data champions have activated metadata to drive impact and prepare for your own data success journey." keywords: "Dataops, data catalog, data catalog tools, atlan, data, metadata catalog, master data management, data discovery, data access, data catalog example, data catalog software, data catalog template, data catalog products, data catalog vendors, data lake data catalog, best data catalog tools, data catalog solutions, data catalog products, metadata management, data catalog creation tools" --- > Atlan is hosting Context Conference, bringing together the leaders and builders at the frontier of giving AI the context it needs to understand their business. It runs online on October 28, 2026, from 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM ET. Atlan co-founder Prukalpa Sankar opens and closes the day. Leaders from AstraZeneca, BNY and Verizon share why they invest in context and what they get from it. Registrants get early access to The AI Context Gap, a new study from MIT Technology Review Insights. Register: https://atlan.com/context-conference/ **Modern Data Team Awards** celebrate 2023's top data leaders and teams, recognizing those who've made significant strides in business impact, visionary thinking, and community contribution. The page offers a sign-up for insights and success stories delivered to your inbox: [https://atlan.com/modern-data-team-awards/](https://atlan.com/modern-data-team-awards/). ## Award categories **Impact Awards.** Working cross-functionally with the business, supporting end users to entire organizations, the Impact Awards recognize the data leaders and teams that became indispensable partners in driving real business value. - Modern Data Team: **Bridge Builder** - recognizes the data teams that unite in common cause with their business colleagues, realizing the potential of data to drive the next great business decision. - Modern Data Leader: **Top Line Driver** - recognizes the leaders who create an organization united around effective use of data, driving new levels of business impact. **Vision Awards.** Recognizing the leaders and teams that placed their organizations on the cutting edge of their industries, the Vision Awards highlight inspirational examples that blend clear-eyed, ambitious goals, and the hard work of aligning stakeholders and technologies to make them a reality. - Modern Data Team: **Future Ready Governance** - honors the teams redefining and expanding which of their colleagues can use data without sacrificing compliance, security, or privacy. - Modern Data Team: **Future Ready Data Mesh** - honors the visionary data teams realizing the potential of Data Mesh, and redefining what's possible. - Modern Data Leader: **Governance Visionary** - honors the teams redefining and expanding which of their colleagues can use data without sacrificing compliance, security, or privacy. - Modern Data Leader: **Data Mesh Visionary** - recognizes the elite data leaders with the talent, empathy, and foresight to guide their organizations into new frontiers of data-driven opportunity. **Community Awards.** From helping their colleagues better understand and apply data, to paying forward hard-earned lessons to the broader data community, the Community Awards recognize the leaders and teams that selflessly helped others achieve more than they ever thought possible. - Modern Data Team: **Data Culture** - recognizes the teams that architect great data cultures, uniting business and technical teams in a common purpose: enabling every one of their colleagues to make confident, data-driven decisions. - Modern Data Leader: **Community Builder** - recognizes the individuals who went above-and-beyond to educate and inspire their peers on what's possible with the Modern Data Stack. ## Meet the winners ### Impact Awards - **Zip - Modern Data Team: Bridge Builder.** A pioneer in buy now, pay later financing, Zip launched a gamification drive to quickly enrich critical data assets. With an ROI framework that quantifies the value of each manual-process-turned-digital, the team is driving $390,000 AUD in annual efficiency gains by ensuring access to data isn't just democratized, but faster and easier than ever before. - **Eric Bradley, Chief Information Officer, TaxSlayer - Modern Data Leader: Top-line Driver.** Now entering his eighth tax season, Eric is building an organization that delivers critical data faster than ever, using best-of-breed tools from the modern data stack. Beyond demystifying a data estate that includes hundreds of thousands of columns, Eric and his team understand that great Data Governance that delivers secure, trustworthy data is a pre-requisite for winning game-changing business, and work in lockstep with organizations across TaxSlayer to make it a reality. ### Vision Awards - **Porto - Modern Data Team: Future-ready Governance.** Migrating from Informatica to Atlan in less than six weeks, Porto built Datapedia, a self-service source of truth about their data, with a goal of attracting 1,000 active users by 2025. In mere months Datapedia attracted hundreds of users and made their 5-person governance team 40% more efficient by automating ownership, documentation, and classification, supporting fast decisions with trustworthy data today, and concepts like Data Mesh and AI in the future. - **Autodesk - Modern Data Team: Future-ready Data Mesh.** Global design and engineering software leader Autodesk created a modern data platform to better support their colleagues' business intelligence needs, then executed a data mesh strategy. 60 domain teams now build, own, and improve their data products, made available using self-service to hundreds of data consumers. - **Kenza Zanzouri, Data Governance Strategist, Contentsquare - Modern Data Leader: Governance Visionary.** Responsible for ensuring data is accessible, understandable, and trustworthy. From creating data products and integrating data quality, to delivering persona-specific value and driving ownership and adoption, Kenza and her team have defined the gold standard for using Active Metadata for Data Governance, streamlining collaboration and propagating understanding and standards across their data assets. - **Mark Kidwell, Chief Data Architect, Autodesk - Modern Data Leader: Data Mesh Visionary.** Sharing their approach with thousands of peers at events like Atlan Re:Govern and Snowflake Summit, Mark is at the forefront of realizing the value of Data Mesh. From balancing distinct ownership and quality responsibilities across domains, to building and governing a modern data stack and enabling non-technical teams to use it, dozens of teams at Autodesk are now empowered to help their colleagues make the most of the data they own. ### Community Awards - **Grainger - Modern Data Team: Data Culture.** Building champions across the organization and a culture of people that care about documentation, the data team at Grainger created a virtuous cycle of data literacy: more subject matter experts willing to share what they know, and more data consumers returning to their new data catalog every day for understandable, trustworthy data. - **Amy Raygada, Senior Data Product Owner, Swiss Marketplace Group - Modern Data Leader: Community Builder.** A frequent contributor to the broader data community, at events like Atlan Re:Govern and through individual mentorship, sharing the ins and outs of her team's Data Governance strategy and demystifying how to approach Data Mesh. - **Michael Weiss, Senior Product Manager, Nasdaq - Modern Data Leader: Community Builder.** Shared their story at Gartner Data & Analytics Summit and Atlan Re:Govern, and in countless conversations with peers: hard-earned lessons on the role of Active Metadata in evangelizing their data strategy, and how to build a business case for building and growing a Data Governance function. - **Takashi Ueki, Director of Enterprise Data & Analytics, Elastic - Modern Data Leader: Community Builder.** Participated in the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit and Atlan Re:Govern and delivered an Atlan Masterclass, providing guidance to the data community on how to drive persona-specific value, realizing Data Contracts, and yielding the most of investments in Data Quality. ## Success, behind the scenes The eureka moments, the challenges, and the triumphs of 2023's award winners. - "Don't expect everything to go according to plan. Roll with the punches, and be resilient." - Leroy Kahn, Data Management Lead, Zip - "Our idea was to build more than a data catalog. We want to expand our domains to go beyond data literacy." - Danrlei Alves, Senior Data Governance Analyst, Porto - "If we could do this, why couldn't others on our platform? Could we take the tech stack that we built, and let other people build using the technologies we'd been using?" - Mark Kidwell, Chief Data Architect, Autodesk - "It's important to listen to (both) data experts and data consumers, who can build a strong data governance framework with you." - Kenza Zanzouri, Data Governance Strategist, Contentsquare - "You can bring in new tools, but if you keep the same methodology and the same cultural approaches, you don't really solve the core problem." - Michael Weiss, Senior Product Manager, Nasdaq - "When I say 'We want to democratize trusted data across Elastic,' I mean enabling the availability and reliability of our data, how we consume it, how we govern it, how we define it, and how we deliver on it." - Takashi Ueki, Director of Enterprise Data & Analytics, Elastic ## More visionary stories, straight to your inbox Discover their success strategies and get inspired to take your team to the next level. Sign up for success stories on the page. Customers shown in the closing banner: Autodesk, Nasdaq, Fox, HelloFresh, Cisco, Plaid, General Motors. [Book a Demo](https://atlan.com/forms/talk-to-sales-contact/)