The annual Data Team Awards highlight how diverse enterprise data teams are tackling some of the most prevalent and complex issues facing the business world.
This year, more than 200 nominations reflect a variety of industries from around the world. Spread across six distinct categories, these finalists highlight the exceptional creativity and ingenuity that organizations apply in their data and AI endeavors. We're excited to share this groundbreaking work with our community of data experts and enthusiasts.
The Data Team Disruptor Award recognizes the enterprise data teams fundamentally changing how their field approaches data management and activation. Honoring those who challenge the status quo, this award highlights teams integrating data and AI into their business practices to set new standards in their respective industries.
Below are the 2024 Data Team Disruptor Award finalists:
American Airlines
American Airlines' purpose is to care for people on life's journey, and its commitment to delivering exceptional service and operational reliability is unwavering. Leveraging the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, American aimed to reduce the number of mishandled bags during transfers by analyzing datasets and automating the baggage handling process. The result was an impressive improvement in processing performance, significantly reducing the number of misplaced bags and enhancing the efficiency of baggage handling.
This improvement was made possible by the Next-Generation Stream Processing Engine, Spark Structured Streaming, which powers data streaming on the Databricks Platform. This unified API for batch and stream processing enabled American to centralize data ingestion and facilitate real-time data gathering and reporting — a testament to the power of leveraging technology to drive operational efficiency and deliver exceptional service. American also sought to optimize staffing efficiencies by enhancing operational processes overseen by assigned baggage-running allocators. The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform was utilized to streamline data ingestion, storage, and access — enhancing analysis and reporting, reducing manual interventions, and improving productivity.
Capital One
One of the largest banks in the U.S., Capital One is known for its innovation and experience in leveraging data and technology. With a commitment to leveraging data-driven insights to enhance customer experiences and drive business growth, Capital One's enterprise data team embarked on a mission to strengthen its data lake architecture to stay on the leading edge of modern data management. Migrating from PVC to E2 means moving a large volume of assets, including hundreds of thousands of notebooks and thousands of jobs, catering to more than 9,000 associates across the entire enterprise — while incorporating best-in-class risk solutions. Anticipated for completion this year, this migration will continue to empower Capital One's data producers and consumers across various job functions to harness the power of data and continue to provide differential value to customers and the enterprise.
J.P. Morgan Payments
J.P. Morgan Payments processes nearly $10 trillion in payments daily, operating in over 160 countries and over 120 currencies. To support processing, the J.P. Morgan Payments data and analytics team spearheaded a comprehensive project to transition from legacy, on-premises platforms to a public cloud data lakehouse architecture. This architecture transformation involved integrating 50+ systems of bank and financial records — totaling 3PB of data — into a production-ready format, accessible to over 3,000 downstream analysts. These same analysts use various analytical techniques and polyglot languages to extract valuable insights, inform clients of changes, and optimize day-to-day workflows.
National Australia Bank (NAB)
As the largest business bank in Australia, NAB has consistently pushed boundaries to redefine the banking experiences and drive industry innovation. In 2021, NAB started a transformative journey to simplify its data architecture, resulting in the launch of "Ada," the bank's strategic data platform built on a lakehouse architecture. Ada has helped NAB to securely deliver data at scale, unlocking opportunities to enhance the customer experience and accelerate the deployment of high-value use cases across the business, including increased personalized marketing campaigns and efficient data flows for financial crime detection. NAB also invested in the large-scale adoption of Databricks SQL and Unity Catalog, supporting a data-driven culture with a "Data & Analytics Guild." These initiatives aim to enable data scientists and data analysts to leverage the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to drive new AI and ML-powered use cases while streamlining data governance and data discoverability and facilitating end-to-end data lineage across systems at NAB.
Unilever
Unilever's vision is to transform into a data-intelligent company, where every decision and action is informed by the best data and advanced analytics to achieve its action plan of driving growth and unlocking potential. Embracing opportunities within their decentralized data management landscape, they harnessed the capabilities of Databricks. The platform enabled them to construct abstraction views and certified views and facilitate unified access through Unity Catalog. This initiative has fostered product collaboration and enhanced cost efficiency by eliminating redundant processes and data overlaps, streamlining governance, and reinforcing data storage resilience. The transition has empowered Unilever with centralized access control, fortified security measures, and streamlined data lake interactions, optimizing operations and catalyzing growth opportunities.
All Data Team Award finalists and winners will be honored during a ceremony at the Data + AI Summit on Tuesday, June 11, at 6:30 PM on the expo floor. Join us as we celebrate the achievements of these exceptional data teams together!
