VIDEO | Glassdoor, Director: Self-Service Analytics Makes Life Easy for Everyone

(US and Canada) Anish Gandhi, Director of Analytics and Sales Operations, Glassdoor, speaks with Daniel Gray, VP Sales Engineering, AtScale, about operationalizing data governance, data reusability, driving trust in data, and the future of self-service analytics.

According to Gandhi, the most critical steps for operationalized data governance are identifying key stakeholders across different functions, forming a study committee, and trying to establish metadata. Next, follow up with a weekly or biweekly cadence of change management updates, noting any new things added or moved across different functions. He explains that the concept of reusability is vital for driving data governance, and several business stakeholders can use governed data.

Regarding data culture, Gandhi says that the semantic layer is the number one thing driving data literacy and culture. It includes standardizing definitions, fields, and calculations that connect to BI or the analytics layer. That way, all the users can access standard definitions and calculations, making the organization more data-fluent.

Sharing tactics to drive trust in data, he mentions that the first thing is to identify some of the key recipients of the data. Next, build a small pilot team and run proof of concepts before rolling it out at a broad level. Regarding gaining buy-in and confidence from the pilot users, it can be followed up with enablement and rolling out across the organization.

Gandhi then defines data quality. In his opinion, any data which is consistent, accurate, and available on time to drive business decisions, perform analysis, and increase data fluency is high data quality. The less time to clean, transform and manipulate the data, the better the quality.

Next, he discusses the adoption and future of self-service data analytics. Gandhi says that self-service is the most cost-efficient and modest way for organizations to implement analytics. It makes life easy for everyone, provides information at one’s fingertips, and is the only way to shape an organization from a data perspective successfully.