Driving accessibility through governed knowledge merchandise seamlessly managed on the Atlas platform.
At a Look
- Kiwi.com, a leading travel technology company that facilitates more than 100 million daily searches for optimal travel routes, sought to simplify access to relevant information.
- By leveraging Atlan’s cutting-edge information catalog, Kiwi.com efficiently organized and monitored thousands of intellectual properties, condensing them into a curated library of 58 discoverable products that facilitate seamless and more effective knowledge absorption.
- This innovative approach has led to a substantial reduction of 53% in workload for their central engineering team, concurrently boosting information personnel satisfaction by a notable 20%. Since its inception, the method has successfully onboarded over 20 groups, fostering a culture of responsible information sharing and usage across the organization.
With over 100 million daily searches for optimal journey routes and facilitating a staggering 22.9 billion kilometres in travel value in 2023 alone, information has become paramount to the continued success of journey technology pioneer Kiwi.com. The company’s innovative algorithm empowers clients to discover and book cost-effective flights often overlooked by other search engines, processing billions of price checks daily across 95% of global flight content.
As Kiwi.com employees dedicate themselves daily to refining their product, skills, and processes, seamless access to trustworthy knowledge is crucial for informed decision-making and continued innovation. As a crucial step in optimizing knowledge sharing, Martina Ivanicova, Knowledge Engineering Supervisor, is responsible for ensuring that her colleagues utilize the information effectively.
On the 2024 Gartner Knowledge & Analytics Summit in London, Martina joined Atlan to share her expertise and classes realized from bridging the hole between information producers and customers, introducing information merchandise, and leveraging Lively Metadata to ship the trusted, comprehensible information that drives the following nice enterprise determination. As she looked back on her odyssey, she found herself pondering a profound and introspective inquiry:
What lies at the pinnacle of human understanding?
Kiwi.com operates on a microservices architecture, featuring provider-based organization within distinct enterprise domains. Utilizing the Google Cloud Platform, they employ a batching strategy to extract data into BigQuery, their central repository for information storage, while leveraging Dataflow to process real-time data and store outputs either directly in Google Cloud Storage or immediately in BigQuery. Transformations further ensure that data is delivered seamlessly into Looker, their market-leading business intelligence platform. Metadata for all elements is centrally managed within Dataplex, a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) service responsible for storing and organizing vast amounts of data properties.
While this configuration might seem straightforward, it actually enables the processing and management of an immense amount of information across the entire system.
Martina revealed that their architecture comprises approximately one hundred Postgres databases, tens of thousands of tables, over a thousand BigQuery datasets, and countless tables, in addition to numerous Airflow workflows and nearly a thousand Looker visualizations.
Discovering Focus with Knowledge Merchandise
At Kiwi.com, reliable information access is crucial for informed decision-making by Knowledge Analysts. Despite consolidating information in one location, finding the right information remained challenging. As a result, Martina and her team were compelled to transcend straightforward accessibility, effectively streamlining their complex knowledge infrastructure for seamless exploration.
When functioning as a Knowledge Analyst, I sought out the term “Vacation spot” at Dataplex and discovered more than 200,000 relevant entries. To determine our solution’s effectiveness, we would employ a multi-faceted approach to gather relevant data. You’re not searching for information; you’re seeking a valuable information product.
With Martina’s team fully on board, they conceptualized information as a valuable commodity, ensuring its reliability, intuitive accessibility, findability, and utility, thereby elevating it to a strategic operational cornerstone.
The implementation of this method resulted in the development of a comprehensive governance framework for managing information assets, which outlined crucial guidelines for ensuring the scalability and reliability of data quality, documentation, security, and related processes.
A Ruled Knowledge Product Mannequin
Martina and her team crafted an information product strategy focused squarely on maximizing the value of their most critical intellectual property. The properties were categorised into tiers, with the top tier holding significant importance for strategic decision-making and financial reporting purposes. The majority of their customers’ go-to sources rely heavily on this top-tier information, mandating stringent requirements for reliability and accessibility, which in turn led to the development of a six-pronged framework for creating, managing, and refining these informational products.
Defining ownership and responsibility for every information product across all product and technology spectra, ensuring transparency and clarity in decision-making processes.
Enabling seamless discovery of information products by providing clear context and comprehensible insights that facilitate effortless comprehension.
Ensuring the precision, timeliness, and dependability of each information product by leveraging a custom-built observability platform for real-time monitoring.
Streamlining the development, revision, archiving, and retrieval of intellectual property through a robust technological infrastructure.
Complying with strict safety and privacy protocols, ensuring the confidentiality of sensitive data while meeting rigorous regulatory standards.
To ensure information reliability, we establish procedures for maintaining data integrity, while concurrently ensuring that both customers and suppliers concur on specific Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs), thereby implementing incident and change management protocols to guarantee seamless operations.
While Martina’s team may contribute to this framework by integrating a diverse suite of tools, including Terraform, BigQuery, Dataplex, Monte Carlo, and Looker, effectively managing data products would require navigating disparate systems as data flows from provider to consumer. Kiwi.com chose Atlan to integrate its diverse metadata management tools into a unified platform.
Martina and her team seamlessly integrate Atlan into their information infrastructure, ensuring that data products are effortlessly accessible, easily understandable, highly performative, reliable, and fully compliant with stringent standards for quality and safety.
Atlantis proved remarkably adept at providing a comprehensive umbrella covering all our metadata efforts. This exercise also enabled us to thoroughly assess the performance of our informational products against specific benchmarks, thereby guaranteeing their compliance with stipulated specifications.
A Streamlined Knowledge Panorama
As they transitioned away from search results yielding thousands of outcomes within a complex data repository, and towards crafting intuitively discoverable, governed information products, Martina and her team have significantly enhanced the efficiency of the Knowledge Engineering function, thereby propelling user satisfaction to unprecedented levels.
Currently, the group is responsible for overseeing 58 premier information products, a carefully curated selection that has significantly reduced and simplified their workload. The panoramic dataset has been reorganized by geographic region, ensuring the systematic collection of proprietary information and robust documentation processes.
This approach has enabled information clusters to assume total responsibility for their data, cultivating a culture of accountability. “We successfully structured the information landscape to align with our business domains.” Martina explained that knowledge is typically controlled and managed by distinct groupings operating within specific spheres of influence.
Through this streamlined process, Kiwi.com successfully enabled more than 20 teams to collaborate effectively and responsibly utilize shared data within their respective groups. Surveys have consistently shown that this initiative has had a profound impact on participants.
In an era of excessive consumption and waste, a powerful lesson emerged from the unlikely source of a popular fast-food chain.
Without the need to sift through 272,000 complex results, a Kiwi.com analyst can efficiently locate exactly what they’re looking for thanks to Atlan’s intuitive capabilities. Through a seamless, user-friendly interface, clients receive a comprehensive overview of their assets, encompassing ownership, associated properties, information contracts, service-level agreements, and any key quality metrics.
Martina posits that gaining access to vast amounts of knowledge is merely the first crucial step towards information democratization, rather than the ultimate destination. Delivering exceptional value to customers’ information needs requires providing expertly curated content that is not only easily discoverable but also straightforward, reliable, and immediately accessible at their fingertips.
