The digital leadership at financial software maker Intuit manages to maintain a ‘customer obsessed’ culture through a constant cycle of data-driven innovation. According to Intuit CIO Atticus Tysen, that innovation can only happen when employees and systems are consistently provided clean, unfragmented data.
“Ultimately it all comes back to data,” he said this week at the Adobe Summit 2019 event in Las Vegas. “Laying down the right infrastructure, laying down the right data pipes, and really making sure all of our employees have the right tools to provide insights has played a major part of that transformation.”
To support Intuit’s digital transformation journey, Tysen and his team has focused on several initiatives to bust data siloes and get the most out of every kind of instrumentation. First and foremost is establishing a holistic data architecture.
Whether it is internal customers or employees, the company learns a lot through in-person observation of how they use Intuit software and get their work done. This observation feeds improvements in technology, but it doesn’t scale well. To scale takes automated instrumentation and to gather insight from that instrumentation “really requires putting in a holistic data architecture, data models, and agreements on what data means,” Tysen said.
In addtion, his team works to democratize data so they can garner better insights about the customer at speed. And, finally, his team focuses on monitoring data pipelines with the same kind of fanaticism that one would monitor customer-facing software offerings.
“If you have an incident with an offering, bells go off and everyone comes running,” he says. “It’s the same way with data. If data isn’t delivered in a clean way to the right team at the right time, that needs to set off alarms.”
