Preventing and eliminating data silos becomes increasingly important — and difficult — as businesses scale and evolve. Data silos slow businesses down and get in the way of collaboration, decision making and consistency. They’re also inevitable when two large companies merge.
This is the problem Frank Carotenuto faced in 2022 when he took a role as the Senior Director of Enterprise Data Platforms at Trellix. It was a new company resulting from the merger of two large cybersecurity firms, McAfee Enterprise and FireEye. They needed a new data platform, which would require restructuring the data teams while keeping critical business data flowing.
In this episode of the Fivetran Data Podcast, Carotenuto shares how he built and deployed an enterprise data platform. The results are compelling: data democratization, productivity improvements and the creation of an impactful, cross-functional center of excellence.
Moving from legacy systems to a modern data stack
Carotenuto and team scrutinized every technical aspect of the data stack: data acquisition, processing, storage and even the frequency of ingestion. They began by replacing legacy Informatica data pipelines with modern cloud-native solutions, like Fivetran and dbt. The new stack allowed them to sync more data more frequently at greater speed, giving the business more agility.
But data modernization isn’t just a technical problem. Trellix initially moved all the data teams into one organization, split into three:
- Master data management, which handles data quality for all accounts and customers
- Data acquisition and pipelines, which handles data warehousing and dimensional data modeling
- Business intelligence, which builds explorable data sets and dashboards
This new structure set the stage for a cultural shift. Before the reorg, every data team ran its own data mart to support various functions, like customer success and marketing. This hub-and-spoke operating model firmly established a data-driven culture of independence and autonomy.
Carotenuto saw an opportunity to harness this mindset and unify the teams with a central data platform. Ensuring its success was not easy to overcome, notes Carotenuto: “It’s a full paradigm shift of process change. Organizations that adapt to that change can quickly embrace new ways of working.”
Empowering data democratization with a center of excellence
An important part of managing Trellix’s paradigm shift was the formation of a center of excellence (CoE). As the new data platform increased data usage across teams, it also increased the risk of new data silos.
Carotenuto proactively kept open lines of communication across business units. “We formed an adjacent team to our enterprise data platform called the Data Council. The uniqueness in this approach really lies in the composition of the team.” The council selectively sought representation from many departments across finance, customer success, operations and more.
Members of this CoE were appointed as data product owners, serving as a conduit to funnel new data product needs to the data teams. This answered the questions of what new data acquisitions, dashboards and pipelines were needed. It also ensured that all new data products were relevant to the needs of the business.
The benefits extend far beyond Carotenuto’s data teams: “When we consolidated our data teams into a single CoE, they didn’t lose the ability to prioritize. What we gained is the ability to reduce duplicative effort because we’re aligned across business units.”
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