Ishita Majumda: What Data Democratization Looks Like at eBay in 2022

Ishita Majumda, VP, Data Analytics Platform at eBay, shares how the
online retail giant’s strategy for establishing data-driven
business practices has evolved in recent months

Data democratization has become a hot topic in recent years.
Increasingly, enterprises want to empower non-data staff to use
data-driven insights and embed data-driven business practices
across their whole organizations.


For many companies, data democratization initiatives start with
delivering programs to improve the data literacy of non-technical
staff. But in this week’s Business of Data podcast, eBay’s VP,
Data Analytics Platform, Ishita Majumdar, shares how this alone
has not been sufficient to entrench data-driven business
practices at the e-commerce giant.


As many companies do in the early stages of data transformation,
eBay established an internal analytics university. It provides a
series of courses taught by Majumdar’s team. But over time, it
became clear this academy was not driving change at scale.


“Everyone attended the classes and ticked all the boxes,”
Majumdar explains. “But they were also saying the product
manager’s job [for example] is so complicated that, if they must
make the time to write these very complex SQL queries, it becomes
a two-person job. That’s when I suggested we take the data where
the user is.”
Making Data Accessible for Non-Technical Staff

Rather than focusing just on upskilling non-technical staff,
Majumdar and her team are now also working to simplify its
analytics tooling and provide platforms that are easier for
ordinary workers to use.


“It fell on my team to do more than just deliver platforms for
the analyst and data scientist communities,” she says. “One of
the areas I'm concentrating most on this year is democratizing
data for the non-tech savvy community. How can we make sure we
build tools and platforms that are easy to access, understand and
create charts and visualizations?”


She adds: “We will modify our tools based on the user, rather
than pushing the user to modify themselves. Tools should be easy
to use. Nobody needs a Facebook tutorial.”


“There should be an abstraction layer to translate the queries,”
she continues. “But, as a user, I should be able to click two or
three buttons or write a simple English query.”


Of course, Majumdar is being mindful not to take functionality
away from staff members who want to master more advanced
analytics tooling. But it’s this combination of developing new
self-service platforms for non-technical staff and improving data
literacy via eBay’s data academy that will form the backbone of
the company’s data democratization programs in 2022.


“There are many people who would still like to do their own
abstraction, they want to go deep, which is great,” she
concludes. “I’m not taking that option from anybody. But most
people don’t want to deal with that. So as a platform team, we’ll
take care of it and give you the interface and visualization
engine which can cater to your needs.”
Key Takeaways


Transform the culture around data. Many
employees still see data as something used exclusively by data
teams


Do what works best for the organization. When
eBay’s data academy didn’t yield the expected results,
Majumda’s team reviewed its approach to data democratization


Bring the data to the user. Developing
self-service data platforms will make it easier for
non-technical staff to harness data-driven insights