Intelligent CIO APAC Issue 28 | Page 73

NOW WE HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY TO BE MUCH MORE DYNAMIC IN THE WAY WE VIEW AND WORK WITH OUR DATA .
INDUSTRY WATCH

NOW WE HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY TO BE MUCH MORE DYNAMIC IN THE WAY WE VIEW AND WORK WITH OUR DATA .

MYOB is a leading business management platform with a core purpose of helping more businesses in Australia and New Zealand start , survive and succeed .

Stefanie Kechayas , MYOB Data Platform Lead
It delivers end-to-end business , financial and accounting solutions direct to businesses employing between 0 and 1000 employees , alongside a network of accountants , bookkeepers and consultants .
Running on the Snowflake Data Cloud , MYOB ’ s new platform replaces existing data services . MYOB Data Platform Lead , Stefanie Kechayas , said the project was sparked by a desire within the company to make better use of its rich data resources to support its employees and improve services to customers .
“ Solutions such as Snowflake allow us to better understand our customers and make evidencebased decisions on what features work best for them ,” said Kechayas .
“ To achieve this , however , we realized that we would have to make some fundamental changes to the way our data is stored and managed .”
MYOB ’ s development teams constantly produce a wide range of valuable data . With the introduction of domain-driven , central storage through Snowflake , MYOB can now achieve greater organization and grouping of this information , and more swiftly access its insights .
“ We had a very Big Data landscape and so our biggest challenge was making sense of that information ,” said Kechayas . “ The way we had set up our data solutions in the past had tended to be focused around particular data sources . Now we have the opportunity to be much more dynamic in the way we view and work with our data .”
An alternative platform
The prior data solution had served to bring multiple data sets into a single location , however it did not provide an easy-to-use interface to allow self-service for staff .
“ A lot of team members simply didn ’ t know where to start . We knew we needed to find a platform that could enable product managers to make informed decisions on what features bring the most value to our customers ,” said Kechayas .
“ We also wanted our senior leadership to have easier access to the data , and for our delivery teams to build data science-enabled solutions for our customers .”
After carefully examining a range of options , a decision was taken in November 2020 to deploy Snowflake , and work on the deployment commenced in December 2020 .
Cultural and performance improvements
With the Snowflake platform now operational , it is far easier for staff to access and make use of a wide variety of data sets . Domain controllers are also able
www . intelligentcio . com INTELLIGENTCIO APAC 73