Every retailer today is digital. Whether you’re a direct-to-consumer digital brand or a 100-year old merchant with an impressive real estate footprint, data is becoming more and more important to your growth. However, harnessing data to drive business value is no easy feat. It can lead to a jumble of messy integrations that break and cause distraction. “Data Operations” is term to describe all the grunt work that has to happen before data can turn into real business value. Streamlining these Data Operations has become a requirement—not just for the retailer’s sanity, but for her bottom line.

Welcome to our new interview series, “Let’s Talk DataOps!” DataOps (Data Operations) is an emerging function that controls the flow of data from source to value. This includes integrating with data sources, performing transformations on the data, converting formats, and writing or delivering data to its required destination so it can be analyzed, inputted into a model, or surfaced for end users. DataOps also encompasses the monitoring and governance of data flows, while ensuring security and scale.

In this new series we’ll be interviewing the leading thinkers in Data Operations, to discuss the state of DataOps from their point of view. Learn about what they do, their biggest challenges, and how they are utilizing DataOps to drive their businesses. For our inaugural interview, we spoke with Jon Loyens, the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of data.world. As a long-time technology executive in Austin, Jon has lived the rise in the trend of data and analytics as a democratizing force. In a past life, he was the VP of Engineering for Traveler Products at HomeAway, and before that, a VP of Engineering and Director of the Labs group at Bazaarvoice.