The complexity of data continuously proves to be the barrier between a successful enterprise and an unsuccessful one, despite the various technologies emerging that claim to be the remedy. The potential value of data is becoming harder and harder to harness; data products, however, may be the key in manifesting an enterprise built on trusted, interoperable data.
Marcie Stoetzel, senior data governance program manager at Seagen, and Sushant Rai VP, product management, Reltio, joined DBTA’s webinar, Seagen's Journey Building Data Products to Speed Innovation, to examine how crafting data products became central to Seagen’s enterprise data strategy, coupled with how data product thinking and best practices can be implemented.
The need for data products, according to Rai, is based on the prevalence of siloed, fragmented data. Disconnected applications are often the culprit of this fragmentation; with a labyrinthine assortment of applications, enterprises are faced with multiple sources of truth that impede business success.
“Multiple sources of truth are very difficult to reconcile,” said Rai. “But, in an effort to move business initiatives forward, teams come up with workarounds and use case-specific orientation of core data that just doesn’t scale, and results in inefficient business processes, frictions, [and] delayed decision making and execution.”
Breaking down silos and achieving interoperable data must come from a unified data structure, according to Rai. With Reltio’s platform, enterprises can unify, manage, and mobilize core proprietary data with speed and flexibility. This serves as the foundation of supporting an interoperable data structure that produces and enables data products.
“You cannot achieve your business goals and exude your initiatives successfully without having reliable data in your systems and cloud enterprise,” noted Rai. “Different outcomes for different parts of the business are all driven by Reltio using your first party data, third party data enrichment, and creating a 360-degree view on top of fully interoperable data.”
Moving to building data products with Reltio, Rai explained that data products are a combination of three things: trusted, governed, entity data, interactions data, and enrichment-derived analytical data.
Reltio offers various packaged products—such as Customer 360 or Product 360—built off velocity packs—out-of-the box, industry-specific data models, configurations, and pretrained ML models—from the jump to bring businesses closer to their data goals.
Stoetzel, regarding Seagen’s journey toward delivering data products, emphasized the meaning of core data. Defining it as data that the organization wants to be able to share and reuse across teams and systems, Stoetzel remarked how Reltio’s out-of-the-box capabilities allowed Seagen to jumpstart their core data management journey for the healthcare professional (HCP) and healthcare organization (HCO) industry.
In the beginning stages, “we looked across Seagen’s landscape and we thought about, ‘How could we unify that HCP and HCO experience?’” said Stoetzel. “The first thing we had to think about was where all, in our universe, these records are entering.”
Identifying where the data originated—for Seagen, it was clinical/medical affairs, commercial, and legal/finance—and who the downstream consumers were was fundamental in the beginning of their core data management journey.
“We met with each of the domains and what we did is we found that each of the domains had similar pain points, mostly around, ‘How do we identify and create quality records around HCPs and HCOs?’” explained Stoetzel. “And not only that, when we started to talk to them about cleansing efforts…they started to realize that the same records were across these different teams and systems, and they were being cleansed in these silos, which we call ‘duplicate cleansing.’”
This was Seagen’s value prop, or the source of what will convince stakeholders to reexamine and invest in a restructuring. Identifying your organization’s value prop will be instrumental in ensuring adequate buy-in for empowering a unified data infrastructure, and in turn, a data product system.
“Data product thinking,” Stoetzel explained, was a central step in driving a single source of truth for domain owners regarding how a data product will be created. Emphasizing findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability were crucial in this reorientated mindset.
After all, domain owners are the heartbeat of successful enterprises, acting as the owner and producer of their data product, according to Stoetzel. Delivering this central mindset achieves three things: increased overall business value, domain owner accountability in terms of data quality, and greater understanding of the boundaries of the data product.
For an in-depth discussion and examination of the nature of data products and the systems it relies on, featuring Seagen’s data product journey, you can view an archive version of the webinar here.