David Jones invites all parts of its business to embrace data

David Jones has set up an internal data community and hired data business partners to bridge the technology and retail worlds, two initiatives it hopes will prove the value of its latest data investment.

As reported by iTnews last month, David Jones is using Snowflake as a data fabric to facilitate access to operational data across the organisation.

A key aim of the retailer is to help the business take advantage of the platform and of data in general.

Previous data investments were technology-led and driven, and this did not always translate into tangible business value.

At a Snowflake World Tour event in Sydney, the retailer shed light on how it intends to get the business engaged around the Snowflake platform.

Platform manager of data and AI Sai Namuduri said that David Jones had, in the past month, set up an internal data community called ‘Insights Avalanche’.

“We have a lot of data-savvy, tech-savvy SMEs [subject matter experts] embedded within the business. They know about our business quite well; what they lack is the technology context, and [with] the rapid pace at which we are launching new [data-led] features on the platform, it's always a bit confusing for them.

“This is why we launched the Insights Avalanche a couple of weeks ago. The idea is essentially we use that as the foundation for collaboration, bringing in everyone from the business as well as tech teams.”

At the time of the presentation - August 14 - Namuduri characterised work through the community as “very early” but valuable.

“[It] can be extremely insightful because it's a mechanism where we take the opportunity to showcase technology capabilities, but with a business context in terms of how it can create value,” he said.

Product manager of data and AI Shalome Stone said that in addition to the data community, “new roles” - data business partners - were established to create closer ties between the data function and the business.

“Those folks can talk in data language but really get into the nitty-gritty of understanding what the challenges are within the business [as well],” she said.

“Within our organisation, there are different ‘languages’, if you like. If you're talking to a customer intelligence [team], it's all around segments, who are our VIPs and what's the cross-shop [a retail term describing how customers compare options across brands or stores], versus if we're talking to marketing, they talk about events and campaigns and retail media models, and our merchandisers [have a different language] again. 

“So, it's about how we bring them on this journey in a way that's meaningful to their language.”

The way data is positioned inside the retailer also supports its drive to ensure that the investment in Snowflake generates tangible value.

“Everything we've done has been around really starting to orient away from data as an infrastructure and very much towards data with purpose,” Stone said.

“It’s about: how do we activate the data and really put it into those use cases that are in their own language, that are meaningful, and that have really clear return-on-investment?”

Stone outlined several ways that the topic of ROI is being broached internally.

One aspect of ROI is “reduced time-to-value” by reusing what has been built for one use case for others.

Another aspect is risk reduction, which is achieved through a strong focus on governance, security and privacy.

The data fabric structure is one guardrail, which is intended to avoid causing problems in the retailer’s core operational systems, but there are others as well.

“We took advantage of the way Snowflake allows us to structure our Snowflake ‘org’ in the context of creating things like data labs or ring-fenced Snowflake accounts for people to safely experiment with new features - once again, without disrupting operational workflows,” Namuduri said.

“I think that's being one of our critical guardrails, along with incrementally building the RBAC [role-based access control] on the platform.

“We have not fully solved the RBAC yet organisation-wide, but I think we are making some really good progress in terms of, at a minimum, integrating [Snowflake] with our identity provider, having the roles pretty much created one-to-one between users and their organisational roles, for example.”

Another aspect of ROI could come from using Snowflake as more than a data fabric.

One idea being floated internally - though not committed to - is to use Snowflake as a customer data platform (CDP), something the retailer currently does not have.

“One of the things that we've talked about is that we don't currently have a standalone CDP within David Jones, and it's something that we've toyed with over the years,” Stone said.

“We're kind of like, ‘Could we just … create a robust-enough CDP for our purposes out of Snowflake? 

“There's this really interesting conversation about not having to invest necessarily all of the time in the best-of-breed standalone [solution]. 

“Now, when bigger and new business cases are coming up, increasingly, the organisation is starting to lean into, ‘Could we just do that in Snowflake?’

“And they don't necessarily know what Snowflake does, but they know that it's more than just a data warehouse, so they know that there's all these inherent smarts [in it]. 

“I think that's part of what we're really starting to explore is what we can do on this platform.”

“It's a constantly evolving world of opportunity.”