How to build the business case for dbt Cloud

Data professionals know the struggle: your organization is bursting with data, but making sense of it—and convincing others of the need for better tools—feels like an uphill battle. Enter the Building the business case for dbt Cloud whitepaper.

This resource is your step-by-step guide to aligning your data initiatives with your company’s strategic goals. It’s designed to help you secure the buy-in and budget you need to make dbt Cloud the backbone of your data workflows. Inside, you’ll find templates, proof-of-value strategies, and insights from dbt Cloud users who’ve seen firsthand how it transforms data practices.

Here’s a sneak peek.

Why dbt Cloud?

Despite recent advancements in analytics—AI, cloud, open table formats, self-service—we’ve still yet to solve core data problems plaguing our organizations: data quality, data velocity, and cost optimization. This is in part because, despite its best efforts, the modern data stack has created data silos. These silos need to be centralized so organizations can build the holistic context needed to confidently embrace data at scale. The data control plane is where this centralization should happen.

dbt Cloud is a data control plane that centralizes the metadata from your analytics workflow and makes it actionable, so your teams can ship and use trusted data, faster.

dbt Cloud is interoperable across data platforms and provides a universal, real-time view of what’s happening across your data estate. Its built-in user experiences are designed to accelerate data delivery and help users understand and improve data quality and compute costs along the way. dbt Cloud offers varied user interfaces and integrations so that stakeholders of all technical stripes can participate in the data workflow and have the trusted insights needed to translate data into strategic decisions.

Scale analytics successfully with dbt Cloud

Everyone wants to “do more with data” and become a “data-driven company”, but there are common roadblocks that derail these initiatives at scale. Data teams are still grappling with issues related to data quality, data velocity, and ambiguous data ownership. This is shown in our most recent State of Analytics Engineering report.

The adoption of dbt Cloud by data teams has led to significant improvements in data speed, quality, and trust. These teams have reported impressive results, including 50x multipliers in data velocity and dramatic increases in data quality and data trust as evidenced by the 30-80%+ reduction in data inconsistencies and improved eNPS scores. By implementing dbt Cloud as their standard, these teams are experiencing tangible benefits. It’s time to help more teams at more organizations realize similar, outsized results.

This paper includes detailed, step-by-step guidance designed to help you successfully adopt and ramp dbt Cloud within your organization. We include templates for mapping technology solutions to business goals, parameters to consider as you evaluate proposed solutions, considerations for scoping a proof of value, and more—so you can have a measured, structured approach to securing the support you need to adopt dbt Cloud at your organization. The tips, templates, and tales in these pages have been gathered via dozens of interviews with dbt Cloud customers—several of whom you’ll meet below.

Step 1: Align with company objectives

When seeking budget or headcount approval, the best place to start is where the business wants to end: your company objectives. Mapping technical or people problems to the organizational goals they jeopardize will not only help you speak the same language as non-data stakeholders, but also provide leverage in your request for resources.

In the above example, company upsell rates haven't progressed as expected. Polling key stakeholders on why they believe they’re behind on achieving this goal will help connect business context to data roots. Use trends identified in these interviews to fill in the “contributing factors” column. This will highlight the need for additional data resources to hit these company-wide goals.

This is just the first of eight actionable steps for building the business case for dbt Cloud. Each step is designed to give you the tools, templates, and insights to align data priorities with strategic objectives. Download the full guide to learn how to confidently make your case and unlock the potential of your data team.