‍In an increasingly data-driven world,businesses are leveraging advanced analytics to gain insights and drive innovation. OP Financial Group, one of Finland's largest financial services companies, teamed up with Brightly to scale up their data and analytics capabilities, fostering a robust data community within the organization. This blog post highlights the journey of building a Citizen Data Science community, detailing the journey and milestones of their data-driven transformation.

The Genesis of Collaboration

The collaboration between OP Financial Group and Brightly was rooted in OP’s vision of a scalable and efficient data and analytics community. This ambitious project aimed to empower various teams within the organization to independently utilize data as well as develop and deploy data-driven applications, while ensuring robust governance and support mechanisms.

Juha Vesanto, Tribe lead at OP Financial Group, envisioned and led OP’s data community transformation from a small and centralized data-oriented group to a wide group of people throughout the organization.

Pekka Vuorio, a Data Architect from Brightly, worked with Vesanto on various aspects of the initiative, thinking about the technical aspects of building a solid foundation for the Citizen Data Science community, as well as building ways to empower the community beyond just enabling access to tools and data.

As Vesanto describes the genesis of the Citizen Data Science initiative, “This has been a story of growth and democratization: We decided that to build a truly efficient and scalable way to utilize data in our organization, we need to reach out and enable everyone in the whole group to utilize their data and find the answers they need from the data, themselves.”

Building the Foundation

The initial phase focused on setting up the foundational elements necessary for a successful data and analytics community. This included:

1. Spreading awareness: To foster a community, there needs to be enough communication about the possibilities and a core group to carry the torch in order to build up interest within an organization.
2. Scaling regulation and governance: As a highly regulated organization, OP needed to ensure that regulatory and governance questions will scale as the usage of data increases and spreads across the organization.
3. Data Access: People need to be able to access the data, and the data needs to be validated and formatted properly to be valuable to users. OP had a lot of data, but the data was at least partially in silos – to fix this, OP started creating a data catalog as well as creating standards for data quality assurance.
4. Data Foundation and Productization: Establishing a common information architecture and data catalog to ensure data discoverability and ownership. This phase also involved making the current data platform more scalable and improving cloud infrastructure with cost transparency and observability, which enables teams to audit and track data usage effectively.

Autonomous Development and Scalable Governance

One of the key challenges in such a large-scale project is avoiding bottlenecks in development and maintaining scalable governance. OP Financial Group and Brightly addressed these through:

1. Communication with management: Keeping management informed at every key turn was essential, as a project of this scale needs to be adopted at every level of an organization, and without management being aware of the benefits and the arc of the project, odds of succeeding are low.
2. Team Autonomy: By federating authority and avoiding dependencies, teams were empowered to develop independently. This autonomy was supported by a simple core tech stack and multiple tools to cater to diverse development needs.
3. Community and Peer Support: Investing in a strong community for peer support ensured scalability. Regular events, training, and a shared community platform facilitated continuous participation and support.
4. Scalable Governance: Implementing a federated authority model and round tables with legal, risk, and IT security teams provided necessary governance without hindering the teams' autonomy. Centralized observability also ensured adherence to best practices.

A growing community

The Citizen Data Science program keeps on growing at OP, democratizing data science skills across the organization and fostering a culture of data literacy and innovation.

The program has seen substantial growth, with the number of active citizen data scientists increasing from 50 to 300 over four years. The community eventually grew to include over 700 members, participating in numerous projects and contributing to the organization's data-driven culture.

Key Takeaways

The collaboration between OP Financial Group and Brightly offers valuable insights into scaling data and analytics capabilities:

1. Management Buy-In: Significant changes and potential costs necessitate strong support from top management.
2. Empowering Business Teams: Avoiding central bottlenecks by enabling business teams to independently work with data.
3. Robust Data Foundation: Building a strong data foundation is crucial for data discovery and innovation.
4. Scalability: Ensuring scalability in infrastructure, ways of working, and governance.
5. Best Practices and Tooling: Providing best practices, templates, and proper tooling to create a common foundation for work.

Conclusion

OP Financial Group’s Citizen Data Science program is a testament to the power of community efforts. They are well on their way to building a robust data and analytics ecosystem that empowers their teams and fosters innovation. This journey serves as a blueprint for other organizations aiming to harness the full potential of data and analytics in their operations.

Vesanto is happy about the work so far and sees a lot of promise: “The work continues – we are still heavily in build mode. The technology and the community need to be developed in step. We have been very happy with the way data has found its way into new teams and functions of the organization, but there’s a lot of work still to be done. This initiative has served as proof positive that this is the way to foster data culture within our organization.”