Sharing the Secret Handbook to Trifacta Customer Success
As the Chief Customer Officer for Trifacta, I have the great pleasure to work with our many customers that span different industries, regions and sizes. I love being exposed to so many varied businesses and discovering the unique ways in which Trifacta can make an impact on their bottom line.
One of the most common questions I get asked early on in customer engagements is: “How do I build and scale our data preparation efforts?” Customers understand the business potential of Trifacta; it’s building out a plan and an organization to maximize that potential that can be overwhelming. But what I find that they’re really asking—whether directly or indirectly—is: “How do I build a Trifacta Center of Excellence (CoE)?”
This blog post is the first in a series in which I will share some of the best practices that we encourage our customers to use while building their Trifacta CoE. My hope is that these posts will give anyone who has invested (or is considering investing) in Trifacta a sense of how to successfully build and scale a CoE. And even well after your CoE is in place, I’ll offer guidance on how to continue asking the right questions to ensure its ongoing success.
Why build a Trifacta CoE?
First, let’s clarify why organizations want to build a Trifacta CoE. First and foremost, a CoE allows an organization to crystallize its data preparation efforts into consistent and repeatable processes that drive valuable analytics across the entire company. The key is having a core team chartered to define and uphold these processes. As a dedicated team of experts, this core team can also provide leadership and training to the rest of your organization, as well as detect any inefficiencies or areas of improvement.
What are the components of a successful Trifacta CoE?
Most Trifacta CoEs are founded on four key objectives:
- Establishing a scalable self-service data prep practice
- Delivering a performant, secure and scalable self-service data prep environment
- Creating a support methodology to engage and enable end users to develop their own data pipelines and flows
- Aligning the delivery processes across multiple business teams to maximize impact.
But simply naming these four objectives isn’t enough (otherwise my blog series would end here). There’s a lot involved in carrying out these objectives—and a lot of potential wrong turns that organizations can take along the way. Over the past several years, we’ve compiled everything we’ve seen that works repeatedly (as well as what doesn’t), which I’m excited to share over the next several blogs.
What’s ahead?
For example, one of the most important pieces of a functioning CoE is the ability to gather the right people and to organize them in the right way. Our next blog will focus on this important topic.
In blogs three and four, we’ll delve into the core processes that a CoE must create to be successful: 1) the development processes for new pipelines and flows, as well as the alignment and governance of that development, and 2) the processes for onboarding new teams, use cases and people.
The final blog will discuss some of the key technical aspects of building a performant, scalable and secure environment for the development and delivery of data pipelines in Trifacta.
I hope this series will help you think about how to build and scale a CoE in your organization and I hope that we get to work together to build it! Please stay tuned for what’s ahead.
To learn why companies of all shapes and sizes are investing in Trifacta, try it out for yourself with our 30-day trial.
