Presented By
O’Reilly + Cloudera
Make Data Work
29 April–2 May 2019
London, UK

From data to data-driven to an AI-ready company: The culture change makes the difference

Julia Butter (Scout24)
16:0016:30 Tuesday, 30 April 2019
Culture and organization, Strata Business Summit
Location: Capital Suite 12
Average rating: ****.
(4.50, 4 ratings)

Scout24 is a leading operator of digital marketplaces specializing in the real estate and automotive sectors in Germany and other European countries. The company operates two well-known and popular brands: ImmobilienScout24 and AutoScout24.

Scout24 recently migrated its monolithic applications to a microservices architecture. However, maintaining a consistent and usable data landscape has only become more challenging by the huge amounts of structured and unstructured data and hundreds of data sources. Furthermore, data-driven product development multiplies the analytics requirements. Every product team needs constantly updated and specially tailored metrics, which often combine product-specific and company-wide data. Having a centralized data team doesn’t scale in this setting—it becomes the bottleneck between data producers and data consumers.

Scout24 created a manifesto of seven principles that break with traditional separation of roles and show a path for dealing with distributed data in a federal and scalable fashion. This leads to DataDevOps: a culture shift similar to DevOps in which application developers own their data and take over responsibilities for data and analytics. Today, 60% of employees use the company’s central BI tool on a weekly basis to understand the business and how to create new products on top of data.

Artificial intelligence is the next big driver on top of data. To make everyone in the company ready for AI and to create awareness for AI to everyone, the company launched an “AI-Readiness Program” in 2018. Again, it’s not about technology and engineers. It’s all about changing the culture in the company to make everyone aware about AI and how to build ML models on top of data.

Julia Butter explains how Scout24 is running a successful culture change and shares experiences with and best practices for facilitating this cultural transformation.

Photo of Julia Butter

Julia Butter

Scout24

Julia Butter is an AI evangelist at Scout24, where she’s actively driving culture change within the company. Julia has a strong background in product development, including data products, strategy, and innovation. She’s an initiator of forward thinking and energizes through her creativity and enthusiasm.