April 08, 2022

Data democratization w/ Sowmia

55 minutes

I hear all the time how "dbt changed our life". When was the last time so many people were so excited about a data tool?

In this episode I talk with Sowmia (Head of Analytics Platform at TIER Mobility) about data democratization – and dbt plays a big role in that.

Key takeaways:

dbt is a game changer. Making use of the power of the data warehouse, and based almost purely on SQL, it has become the foundational platform for all other data products. It also allowed the team to grow from 5 to 60 people quickly.

Analytics engineering is the name of the game. AE do the work previously done by DWH + BI engineers. They focus on data modeling, and are often embedded in business functions. (In contrast to data analysts or scientists, they don't work on storytelling or generating insights.)

Looker works great for enabling self-service access to data assets (created via dbt). It allows for the definition of metrics in version-controlled code. Analysts will only create a few "one-stop" dashboards, with business users doing most of the ad-hoc analysis and report building.

The analytics team is running data literacy onboarding and training programs, and measuring adoption and success also via regular surveys. As next steps, they're looking into bringing in a data catalog tool to further help business users make sense of the data.

Find Sowmia and Valentin on LinkedIn.

...more