Adobe strengthens data culture by engaging employees

Adobe wished to strengthen its data culture further to help its 18,000 employees access these definitions in Collibra without interrupting the flow of their current task. The leadership felt it would be helpful to have the definitions of these terms embedded directly into other solutions, such as Tableau. For example, if someone in the C-suite was looking at a report in Tableau, that individual would be able to mouseover a business or data term and immediately see the definition of that term. They would not need to be trained in Collibra’s software to access the definition or divert their attention away from what they were working on to find the information. Adobe wanted people to be able to get the answer wherever they are.

Adobe’s approach transfers the metric definitions from Collibra to a MySQL database table. The definitions are then brought into Tableau as a separate data source. This data source can then be used in any Tableau workbook to surface definitions, calculation rules, or any other attributes that are stored in Collibra.

The Adobe team added other useful functionality to this arrangement. They imported the workbook and data source metadata from Tableau into Collibra and provided links from Collibra to the authorization system that would enable the users to request access to the workbooks and data sources on Tableau automatically.

The mouseover functionality also provides links from those solutions back to Collibra Data Intelligence Platform – the data about the data – and how it is used. It describes the structure of a piece of data, its relationship to other data, and its origin, format, and use.

Thanks to the success of the Tableau integration and Collibra Connect, the Adobe team has undertaken other initiatives. They have integrated Microsoft PowerBI with Collibra using a similar technological approach. Adobe has also integrated its customer relationship management system (CRM) with Collibra, so that definitions can be pushed into the CRM. For this project, Adobe uses APIs that reach into Collibra.

Adobe has also created an acronyms glossary for the thousands of acronyms that are used across its businesses. The team scoured Adobe’s Wiki pages and harvested acronyms off of them and pushed them into Collibra. They then re-pointed all of the Wiki pages back to Collibra. As a result, acronyms are being managed consistently and employees are now obtaining the correct meanings for acronyms every time.

Building on this, Adobe created an employee assistant chatbot. Employees can type an acronym into Adobe’s internal chat interface and the chat will look up the acronym and return the full term. Alternatively, employees can type in a business or data term and receive the definition. For example, if an employee types in the term “annual recurring revenue,” the chatbot will come back to the employee with a list of the top search results from Collibra, a link to the entire list of search results in Collibra, and the definitions for each one of the top three search results. The Adobe team built it themselves, using out-of-the-box Collibra API calls.