BI University: How Gojek BI Team Evangelise Data Skills Inside the Company
Written by gland wialldi and Thelma Ghatya
We believe that every business decision must be based on data. In Gojek, we have the Business Intelligence (BI) team that covers this. The team caters all data needs — from the organization’s needs to simple daily data needs — and is a thought partner for all teams in Gojek by giving data insights.
As time goes by, the number of teams in Gojek increases to cover various aspects, and their data needs also increases. But on the other hand, not every business user has technical data skills. What will the business users do then? They will ask BI team to do data ad-hoc task.
With this huge demand, it’s difficult for the BI team to help all teams in Gojek. The business users need to wait for a long time for the BI team to take their ad-hoc data request. For that reason, the business users act on a hunch for their decisions, which is not a solid base for making important decisions. We realized that it would be better if we can leverage the data capabilities to everyone so they are able to make data analysis on their own.
So, how can we handle the problem?
We built a training program that covers all end-to-end data analysis processes, called BI University. The goal of BI University is to give birth to more BI analysts inside every team in Gojek Group so each team will be more data literate and more comfortable making data-driven decisions. This program was inspired by Data University from Airbnb, which aims at empowering their employees regarding data skills.
We tried to design BI University as a perfect place for our employees to learn data capabilities. We divide the participants into two streams: Basic and advanced students. We do this because we want to accept all levels of proficiency. The participants range from those who have never used query to those who are used to queries but still want to advance their technical skills.
The program starts with training classes.
No, it won’t be like sitting in a class that is boring or too theoretical. Instead, we conduct a simple, effective, and more hands-on class in which they could apply what they learn directly in the class. The training is used as a basic knowledge and practice before dealing with the real project.
Although their problems are more heavy on technical skills, we believe that we need to provide them with basic data analysis knowledge. It can also give them another perspective to do analysis. For the material, the training starts with telling what data is available in Gojek. After that, we continue to give insights regarding how we can gather business requirements and build a data product. Then, we will move on to the more technical segments. The technical segments include querying data using SQL, creating dashboards for data visualization, and making the dashboards relevant in real-time using jobs.
After the training class, we give a space for them to apply the knowledge they’ve gained in the training class to their respective projects. Each participant will be guided by one mentor to work on the project. This guidance will cater to what is missing when applying theory into a real project. It can also become their experience in making a data-driven decision.
The final part of this program is for the participants present their projects in a showcase. The mentors and the participant’s team members, including supervisors, will join the showcase. Hopefully, their team can directly give feedback for the project and they can directly use the results of the project to their team.
So what is the next step for us?
How can we make sure that the participants can apply what they’ve learned in this program to their daily work? Are they really satisfied with the results? Or perhaps is there anyone who wants to join in the next batch? We can confidently say “Absolutely”.
As for the program itself, the number of our troops who registered for the program has significantly increased. Some of the participants even became a teacher or mentor in the next batch. It means the participants feel that BI University is worth their time, both for learning and sharing their knowledge.
For the participants themselves, there’s a significant increase in the number of queries and dashboards they’ve made when we compare it to before they joined BI University. This becomes one of our indicators that the participants have applied data analysis for decision making. Some of their respective teams have said that they can depend on the participants for the technical data process.
The next step for us is to evaluate how we can make sure what they’ve learned is implemented in their daily work. This evaluation is needed to be our proof of the impact from BI University to Gojek Troops. From that, we expect that they can create deeper and more impactful insights for their respective teams. Not only that, we also have to make sure that the BI team also sees less ad-hoc requests.
Interested to deep dive and learn more about data? Check all the available data jobs in Gojek’s Career Page here.
