The Challenge

Increase awareness and adoption of NRG’s data lake and improve data consumer trust.

NRG had the vision to create a data-driven culture where people at every level of the organization were empowered to use, understand, and trust data to drive informed business decisions that better served customers and connected dots across their value chain. To help the company transition toward a data-driven culture, they needed to establish a robust data foundation that would:

• Provide visibility and transparency to key business reports and metrics.

• Promote collaboration across its enterprise hub and business unit spokes.

• Facilitate the creation of seamless data products that provide valuable insights.

The keys to this adoption were transitioning to a hub-and-spoke model and tackling the common challenges the company historically faced with data collaboration, which included:

• Heavy reliance on tribal knowledge.

• Inconsistent business and data definitions.

• Data silos.

• Low visibility into existing data.

The Solution

Democratizing data with a customized internal data marketplace.

To ensure the data marketplace would be adopted, a key to data democratization and data-culture, Credera used a design-thinking approach. We began by refining the problem statement and conducting user research and narrowing down to the priority users of the marketplace whose needs we would focus on. We then defined key features, minimum viable product (MVP) scope, and functional requirements based on the existing Collibra architecture and the needs of our executive and power marketplace user personas.

The development phase involved creating prototypes and iterating on the front-end experience. Finally, we delivered a modern, scalable solution by building out the NRG-specific data browse and request experience integrating with Collibra, Power BI, Databricks, Azure Active Directory, and various AWS services including Athena, Lambda, CloudWatch, and DynamoDB. Once the MVP was launched, we continued to work with NRG to mature the data marketplace product, considering both user feedback and new users for roll-out.

Following a product-focused approach provided the structure to ensure the team was user-focused, aligned with business goals, collaborative, and risk-aware. Relying on Credera’s product management expertise to implement the marketplace features ensured prioritization of target user needs and alignment of marketplace feature development with business goals. This culminated in quick adaptation to new objectives, effective communication, and collaboration between cross-functional teams, and identification and mitigation of risks and challenges to ensure continuous and timely feature delivery.

The Results

Increased adoption shows progress in NRG’s data-driven journey.

NRG’s overall enterprise data and data lake have seen accelerated awareness, adoption, and understanding across the organization. This has been especially true among NRG’s executive team; its business leaders are better able to find and leverage data products to make informed decisions. Additionally, key data science teams have begun to use and trust data from the enterprise lake for key models and analyses.

Data democratization is fully underway and adoption is growing, as measured by an increasing number of unique visitors and time spent in the tool. This growing adoption among a steady user base is a sign of increasing trust in the data lake’s data offerings. Additionally, the user experience for finding and leveraging data products across the enterprise has improved, as measured by conversions to ‘data check-out’ in the marketplace.

What was once a time-consuming process consisting of emailing and finding those with tribal knowledge, is now as simple as search, click, and read. The dedicated marketplace front end has surfaced data product owners, data stewards and source owners, lineage, and more to allow consumers to quickly find and understand what they need and producers to more efficiently find raw data and share products. By embracing the marketplace, NRG is moving rapidly toward data democratization, enabling everyone to easily access, trust, and use data for business insights.