Real Estate Marketplace Domain Group Accelerates AI Model Development with Alation
Challenge: Distributed businesses, distributed data
Domain Group is a top property technology and services marketplace and home to one of Australia’s largest portfolios of property brands. Domain’s digital solutions reach an average of six million Australians each month. “What sets us apart is our innovative culture and our passion and dedication to customers,” says Pooyan Asgari, the chief data officer at Domain.
Domain operates a marketplace business model in which smaller business units work together to deliver full-service solutions to customers, brokers, and agents. Data is the lifeblood of the Domain marketplace, and the understanding and exchange of information across the organisation are critical.
Domain established a data-driven strategy to ensure all their marketplace businesses had access to needed data. They also adopted leading-edge technology like the Snowflake Data Cloud and Tableau to manage and analyse their increasing volume of data. However, this growth in data volume and variety led to a steep rise in ad hoc questions about data definitions, policies, sources, and metrics, overwhelming the Group’s data teams.
“Without a unified definition of the data, without proper alignment in the way that we describe and define concepts around the data, the interchange of knowledge and information became quite difficult,” says Asgari. Furthermore, without visibility and a comprehensive understanding of their data assets, user rights, sources, lineage, and data quality, Domain couldn’t leverage AI models for new customer insights. Finally, with changes in Australian data privacy regulations looming, Domain needed to ensure that their data processes, policies, and technology were best in class.
Objectives:
To ensure that users across all businesses could access, understand, and gain insights from their data, Domain needed to:
Create a single source of truth for data knowledge
Clearly define and disseminate data use policies and define data roles
Improve data literacy to boost self-service
Implementation: Delivering data intelligence and governance
Asgari’s team chose the Alation Data Intelligence Platform to create an active data governance framework for the nearly 100 million data points generated daily in Domain’s data cloud. “Alation’s ease of use helps maximise the chance of adoption throughout the business,” says Asgari. “We were also quite keen about the innovative aspects of the solution. We’re a fast-moving business and we are quite interested in working with organisations like Alation that are also looking to the future and who are quite innovative in their products.”
Domain has connected Alation to both Snowflake and Tableau to provide full visibility into data lineage and an understanding of data used for reporting at Domain. “Alation empowers us to find meaning in our data and improve the quality of business decisions,” says Chantelle Robertson, a member of Asgari’s team who leads data governance at Domain. “It allows us to unlock the value of our data and turn it into a strategic, competitive asset.”
Alation is central to Domain’s “Metrics that Matter” initiative. “At a high level, these are the headline business metrics that are crucial for evaluating the performance and impact of Domain,” says Robertson. “Alation allows us to make the metrics accessible, to understand the metrics, and measure the data accurately.” Domain also uses Alation and Snowflake to ensure their data policies and processes are best in class to adhere to new regulations about data privacy and data destruction.
Results: Cataloging trusted data for decision-making and AI modeling
By implementing Alation, Domain has improved access to critical information while enhancing data governance. Previously, data was scattered across various platforms, drives, spreadsheets, and emails. By centralising their data in Snowflake and cataloguing it in Alation, Domain has enabled data users to swiftly extract insights from their data.
With Alation, Asgari and his team have delivered greater efficiencies across the organisation while fostering and growing a mature data culture. Domain has enhanced data literacy by using Alation to clarify data availability and permissible uses, and has established robust data governance with clear policies, processes, and roles for data stewards, owners, and SMEs. “Before Alation, data discoverability at Domain was inefficient, filled with ad hoc questions about data which slowed time to insight,” notes Asgari. “After Alation, we see transparency, trust, and reliability in our data definitions, concepts, and knowledge.”
As Domain adopts new AI initiatives to provide new customer offerings, Asgari’s team relies on Alation to ensure that trusted data is used for AI modeling. “As we incorporate our data into AI models, Alation plays a big role in ensuring we have a full, transparent understanding of our data assets, the user rights attributed to the assets, the lineage, and the reliability and quality of the data,” says Asgari.
This greater understanding of the data for AI models also helps data scientists at Domain deliver their AI models faster, because they’re not searching for definitions, user rights, and lineage. “Alation has shortened the time from data understanding to model development,” says Asgari. “Agility and improvement in the development cycle is one of the key benefits of Alation for our AI initiatives.”
