Lineate CTO at Touch.Point GE

Introduction to Touch.Point 24 

In June of 2024, I had the opportunity to travel to Tbilisi, Georgia, home of Lineate’s primary development office, to attend the Touch.Point 24 marketing technology conference as a keynote speaker. Touch.Point is the largest annual marketing technology conference in the region, and the 2024 conference included keynote speakers from the United States, Western Europe, the Middle East, and the Caucasus. 

Challenges in Data Integration and Reporting

My keynote presentation focused on common pitfalls inherent in most, if not all, data integration and reporting project implementations; Lineate’s approach to reporting architecture and implementation, known as Data Octopus; and a short list of key best practices to consider when implementing a reporting solution for businesses that have not previously enjoyed a data-driven approach to their day-to-day and longer-term strategic management.

The Impact of Poor Data Quality on Project Outcomes

Throughout my career as a developer and software engineering leader, I have played a part in numerous data integration and reporting project implementations. A common theme throughout these projects, independent of the industry or the scale of the data, has been the no-longer-surprising lack of data quality invariably found in all source data systems that need to be integrated and reported on. Failure to properly account for this inevitable lack of source system data quality during project planning is a primary cause of cost overruns and overall reporting project failure. Other major causes of significant challenges when implementing data integration and reporting projects are the tendency of the development team to go down a rabbit hole in a search of the perfect architecture and tool set that will cover all possible future use cases, no matter how esoteric they might be, and for stakeholders and the development team to fail to create a common understanding of the “shape” of the business domain that will be reported on.

Introducing Data Octopus 

Data Octopus is the current evolution of Lineate’s approach to implementing business-centric reporting solutions for our clients and ourselves. The Octopus approach and toolset came about as we began to rework our internal reporting solution, which had outgrown its initial third-party implementation platform, at the same time that we were implementing a cloud-based reporting solution for a major player in the hotel management industry. As we approached these two seemingly separate projects simultaneously, we realized that a single common approach could be taken for reporting infrastructure as code and defining a data processing pipeline within the AWS Cloud environment. This realization resulted in an approach to reporting implementation that allows us to very quickly spin up new projects from scratch into a common architecture and set of tools that are familiar to our development teams, meaning that developers can avoid the common pitfalls of not paying enough attention to data quality control and domain definition due to lack of appropriate time spent where it is most needed on a project.

Key Takeaways

My presentation concluded with a set of key points that I personally feel are critical to remember and consistently consider when implementing data integration and reporting projects, independent of scale. Taken directly from my keynote, these points are as follows:

• Expect that your data will be dirty at first, more dirty than you assume. Plan time for this, and build automated checks and balances to keep things clean.

• If you are a developer, understand how your users think about the business domain. Ask them to draw their concept of the business on a whiteboard. That is your model; build toward it.

• If you are a user, don’t be afraid to sit down and sketch out your concept of how the business works with the development team. The developers need to understand how you think in order for the end result to be useful.

• Keep your initial tool selection simple and begin end-to-end iterations as quickly as possible.

Engaging with the Global Tech Community in Tbilisi

I am very happy to say that the response to my keynote at Touch.Point 24 was very positive. I was particularly pleased and impressed that numerous conference participants approached me after the event, excited by how Lineate’s approach to reporting projects could be highly relevant for them in “non-reporting projects,” such as efforts to clean and process data for machine learning or identity resolution within marketing campaigns. It was a pleasure to discuss with these folks my opinion that these are just variations of data integration and reporting use cases, and as a result, such projects can clearly benefit from the Data Octopus approach. It was also delightful to have another opportunity to spend some time at Lineate’s development headquarters in Tbilisi. Tbilisi, and the Republic of Georgia at large, is a vibrant source of developer talent and an up-and-coming tech community, and every time that I visit I feel fortunate that Lineate is so well established in the local tech community and so well positioned to benefit from the talent and excitement for software development that is found in Georgia.

See the full video presentation here: