Data Guild

I am very excited about leading a "Data Guild" at Omio as a means to create an Analytics culture and democratize Analytics/Data usage across multiple teams. 

In a fast-growing organization like ours, the sprawl of data soon becomes significant. At this stage, it becomes necessary to push for some standards and common practices around data usage without compromising the speed, productivity or flexibility that comes with distributed teams. 

In many ways, it's the same journey that DevOps typically takes, trying to balance between team productivity with necessary restrictions imposed by standardization. However, unlike DevOps, business-intelligence and data-science are, by nature, secondary concerns for most teams - you can still ship without Analytics. Therefore, establishing a culture of Analytics and Data Science sometimes becomes even more challenging. 

In other words, this is not just an exercise in standardizing processes and tooling. An equally big aspect is promoting a culture of context sharing and building a common understanding across disparate teams.    

Creating collaboration forums like a Guild is one way of doing this. In my opinion, it's important to run a guild as a "moderator" rather than an "orchestrator". The focus should be to provide a platform for conversations and enablement but not to create a prescriptive environment. At the same time, the moderators must be prepared to wear multiple hats, at least in the beginning, to create a sense of purpose and establish a cadence.

It is still early days for our Data Guild. The initial response is great but only time will tell how effective this experiment would be in bringing our teams together in democratizing data at Omio.

Fingers crossed.