Data contracts for 3rd party data

Mostly when I talk about data contracts I’m talking about applying them to data generated within our organisations. That’s usually the most valuable data we have. It’s also the data we have most control over its generation.

But 3rd party data suffers from similar problems, so how do we apply data contracts to that data?

Well, it depends on the 3rd party. If they are one you have a good relationship with and some leverage with, there’s no reason why you can’t ask them to provide a “contract” around the data they are providing, which could contain agreements over the quality of the data.

However, most of the time we’re getting data from large 3rd parties like Salesforce where we have little leverage. For those, it’s best to have the data contract implemented as close as you can to the ingestion, and owned by someone who has the most context on that supplier. So, in the case of Salesforce you might have a Salesforce Admin own it.

P.S. my book, Driving Data Quality with Data Contracts, is on sale on Packt where you can get the ebook for $10/£8. Do check it out if you haven’t got it already!

If you do have it it would really help me out if you’d consider writing a review on Amazon (even if you didn’t buy in there, you can still review if you’re an Amazon customer). Thanks!