Data transformation is the process of turning raw data into a form that’s ready for AI and analytics. Scaling this process within organizations has become challenging.

At one end, the volume of raw data is exploding as sources proliferate. At the other, the need for transformed data has never been greater, driven by demand for trusted AI models and data-driven insights. In the middle, a limited number of programming data engineers are charged with getting the data ready.

We’ve written before about the challenge of having too few data engineers. There is another problem. 

While data engineers are skilled at coding data transformations, it is the subject matter experts in the business (i.e., business data users) that know how data should be mapped and transformed in the first place. The result is a seemingly endless back-and-forth between business data users and data engineers, as requirements are sent, addressed, missed or corrected, sent again, and so on.

Does this ring true?

• Business users pass detailed requirements to data engineers through documents or tickets.
• Communications break down as the nuances of mapping and joining get lost or misinterpreted.
• A frustrating cycle of revisions and back-and-forth begins.
• Delays prevent the business from efficiently leveraging data.

Addressing these challenges requires a shift towards enabling business data users to transform data on their own and establishing clear standards that facilitate smoother interactions across teams. 

The Databricks “Easy Button”

Prophecy democratizes data transformation by enabling all teams — regardless of their skill set or areas of focus — to quickly transform data on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform on their own. In this way, Prophecy empowers organizations to leverage their business data fully and not be limited by title or where they sit in the organization, fostering greater innovation and operational excellence. 

The needless back-and-forth between business data users and data engineers is minimized or even eliminated in at least three ways:

• Increasing productivity through self-service
• Maintaining business standards with extensibility
• Simplification with a complete platform

Increasing Productivity Through Self-Service

Prophecy significantly boosts the productivity of teams operating on Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, empowering business data users to develop data pipelines efficiently and uniformly - on their own. This happens through a visual, drag-and-drop interface that enables a wider array of users to independently serve their own data needs. Prophecy Data Copilot simplifies the generation of these visual transformations through natural language prompts, further simplifying the development process. Visual transformations are turned into 100% open-source code, which increases operational excellence and enables software development best practices. 

Maintaining Business Standards with Extensibility

Prophecy packages are standard pipeline components for business & operational logic, usually built by data engineers. Prophecy Package Hub is a company-specific marketplace of packages, giving data consumers a place to search and discover these components for use in their own pipelines. With packages, business users construct high-quality, uniform data pipelines on their own, without the typical reliance or back-and-forth with data engineers.

Simplification with a Complete Platform

Embracing simplicity within the complex realm of data management can be viewed as challenging, even unattainable. Adopting a comprehensive platform approach can be transformative. By providing a single platform that meets the needs of every data user across every stage of the pipeline lifecycle, companies can eliminate the divide between teams and ensure everyone participates in data projects without delays. Prophecy is a complete platform, doing away with the typical silos and back-and-forth that disrupt data work. 

Johnson & Johnson Achieves Self-Service Data Transformation

Data transformation was a significant challenge for the American multinational, pharmaceutical, and medical technologies corporation, Johnson & Johnson (J&J). The root of the problem lay in the cumbersome task of combining and preparing data from over 200 supply chain sources, which slowed down their operations and hampered the agility needed in their supply chain management.

The turning point for J&J came with the introduction of Prophecy. The solution layered on top of the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform and allowed the SMEs at J&J to perform self-service data transformations. By leveraging Prophecy's visual interface, these SMEs could now directly manipulate data, significantly reducing the back-and-forth with data engineers. The shift not only democratized data access within the company but also aligned perfectly with the growing trend of empowering business users to handle data-centric tasks that are traditionally reserved for technical experts.

With Prophecy and Databricks working together, J&J witnessed a tenfold increase in data object creation, highlighting a significant boost in productivity and data transformation capacity. Plus, this technological partnership led to a 60% reduction in costs associated with data management processes. Perhaps most impressively, the speed of pipeline creation saw a 150% increase, underscoring the efficiency gains from SMEs undertaking the data transformation process independently. 

Get Data into the Hands of Business Data Users, Faster 

The historical dependency on data engineers to code transformations places a heavy demand on an already strained team. Because data engineers are tasked with transforming and preparing data across the entire organization - in addition to their many other responsibilities - the result is a landscape marked by frustration and low productivity as many are forced to wait for and spend needless cycles on data transformations that are critical to their operations. 

Prophecy disrupts the status quo. Data users at all skill levels are enabled with an intuitive platform that simplifies data transformation with the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. The visual, drag-and-drop interface equips business users to transform data like seasoned data engineers. Prophecy ensures that businesses can streamline the development, deployment, and management of data pipelines, which accelerates SME productivity and further enables organizations to end the back-and-forth between data engineers and business data users. 

Want to see how Prophecy can take your team to the next level? Sign up for a 21-day free trial today.