Intro to Knowledge Hub Implementation for Data Team

Working with data - whether it’s designing pipeline architecture or deriving insights - is your thing.

Spending countless hours answering business users’ questions, or working out why, yet again, different departments’ reports conflict in the number of “conversions” they report - is not your thing. And yet you spend way too much time doing precisely those things.

Enter the Octopai Knowledge Hub.

A Knowledge Hub makes it easy to keep everyone in your company (technical and business users alike) on the same page when it comes to your data. And it frees up your time to work with data in the way that you really enjoy.

A story of data team freedom

The data team at a large enterprise spent an inordinate amount of their time putting out fires (“Why is this metric not showing up in this report?! We need it for an audit - tomorrow!”) and fielding self-service BI user questions (“I need a dataset that shows export sales per product category for last quarter, but I found three datasets that seem to cover that and they all have slightly different numbers. What’s the difference between them?”)

The situation was most extreme for senior members of the team who had amassed a large amount of tribal knowledge. They consistently received more than their fair share of questions, both from colleagues within the data team and from the rest of the organization.

The data team’s passion was developing new data projects, but they had much less time to spend on that aspect of their work than they wanted. The constant minor emergencies and customer support requests interrupted the flow of and affected the quality of their work.

Then the enterprise invested in Octopai’s Knowledge Hub. The initial construction of the Knowledge Hub was completely automated; Octopai harvested and ingested their data systems’ metadata and then integrated all the external documentation uploaded by the data team.

Already the data team sensed that they were getting fewer support questions - and this was only the beginning.

Then it came time to actively enhance and enrich the Knowledge Hub assets. The data team identified which data assets they most commonly got questions about, and they added descriptions and roles to those asset entries. Any time a team member did receive a question, they directed the questioner to the Knowledge Hub’s built-in collaboration tools, requesting that they ask the question there. When the relevant data engineer wrote out the answer and added it to the asset entry, they knew they were answering the question once and for all.

Over the next four months, the data engineering team saw the number of questions within the Knowledge Hub increase and the amount of communication outside the Knowledge Hub decrease significantly. In addition, the Knowledge Hub became the primary (and eventually the only) source of documentation on data assets, putting every department and every employee in the company on the same page. Finally, finally, there was one source of truth.

With the increased consistency, accuracy and transparency around the company’s data assets, the enterprise’s data team found themselves called upon less to do trouble-shooting and emergency management, leaving them with time and peace of mind to do the data work that they truly enjoyed. 

Where the Knowledge Hub can save the day

This is the fifth time this week a business user has asked me ‘how is customer life time value calculated?’ Every time it’s an interruption from the work I’m trying to get done.

Your Knowledge Hub empowers your business users to find the answers on their own, with definitions, descriptions and more for every data asset in your systems. If a user has a question that calls for more expert or technical knowledge, built-in communication tools let them ask and you answer right there in the Knowledge Hub entry. So you only have to answer any question once - and then the answer is forever recorded and easily accessible.

Whenever I receive a change request for a data asset, it takes me longer to find documentation on what’s been done on that data asset already than it does to actually make the change.

Your Knowledge Hub functions as a one-stop-shop for all data information and documentation. This centralized, always up-to-date Knowledge Hub significantly shortens the amount of time you need to put into preparing for a change to a data asset or a business process. Communication about data assets is always about the most updated version: no more misunderstandings or miscommunications. Every additional asset you organize or documentation detail you add will pay exponential returns in future time and resources saved.

Regulations require us to identify, mask and limit access to PII. But it feels like such a waste of time to have to check all our assets manually every time we have an audit coming up.

Knowledge Hub entries provide a place for noting the sensitivity level or access permissions of each data asset. The search function of your Knowledge Hub enables you to easily locate all data assets with any given sensitivity level. Audit preparation - or any other task involving identification of PII - becomes much quicker and easier.

How YOU can make the Knowledge Hub a success

Concentrate initial efforts on enriching the Knowledge Hub to the most used data assets.

Like almost everything else, your company’s data assets subscribe to the 20-80 rule: about 20% of your data assets are responsible for 80% of your company’s data use and value you derive from data. Identify those assets and assign responsible parties to actively go in and enrich their assets.

Add updating the Knowledge Hub to pre-existing data management routines

Integrate checks and updates to your assets into your processes for handling change requests, user inquiries, new data assets and other pre-existing data management responsibilities. For example:

> Make it a standard part of a new project to document its data assets in the Knowledge Hub.

> Make it a step in closing a change request to update the Knowledge Hub for the specific asset that the change request addressed.

Just adding these checkboxes to your existing checklists and routines can be a powerful Knowledge Hub management tool. Slowly and painlessly, your Knowledge Hub will become more comprehensive and even more effective.