Sources and Destinations: Data Engineering

Photo by Markus Spiske / Unsplash

Recently, our CEO Ahmed joined an episode of Sources and Destinations to talk about Data Engineering. The whole thing is worth a listen so check it out!

Data Engineering's role

I look at data engineering as the most fundamental piece of decision-making

Data engineering is the foundation a data-driven approach.

“The way a data engineer structures data, the way a data engineer ensures quality changes the culture of how people consume data, changes the kind of questions people are asking, and changes the kind of questions people are answering, and that’s the essence of what makes a company data-driven.”

Ahmed explains that data engineering doesn’t just clean the data (a step often missed by people). It's mostly about stitching the data together and presenting it in a more usable and understandable format.

He thinks that today’s most common practices aren’t really the best ones, and it needs to change, “We need more standard, more validated approaches to help companies figure out what their data is really saying and where their data engineers can structure that data in the right way.”

Start-up companies shouldn't compare their data to big companies like Facebook, Netflix or Google. Those companies are trying to solve very different problems with different tools and solutions. So if you’re working on your small business, focus on asking better questions and making better decisions.

What Does it Mean to Be Data-Driven?

Most companies are data-informed, but they are not data-driven. What’s the difference?

Companies that are data-informed rely heavily on their dashboards and look for data that best represents a story that they can piece together for them to make a decision. “Data-driven is when people actually have hypotheses, data is used to analyze that hypothesis, and then a decision can be made given the conclusion of data...and it’s actually a really, really, really hard thing to be data-driven.”

Ahmed aims to change that with Narrator, a data platform that standardizes all data into a single structure to reinvent how companies relate to their data.

Listen to the whole podcast here: