Data Platform

One of the benefits of data contracts is the amount of automation they unlock.

This could include platform capabilities such as:

How many times has your data team gone from centralised, to decentralised, and back to centralised again?

More than anything else, your success is determined by your communication.

That includes:

• Using different formats for different results (newsletters, workshops, tech talks, meetings, etc)
• Celebrating success, and admitting where you got things wrong
• Building relationships with people in different teams and roles
• Using the right language for the audience

You could have the best platform, but without communication your adoption of data contracts, or any transformation, will not be a success.

The goal of every data architecture has always been to provide accessible data to the organisation.

The whole point of enabling self-serve is autonomy.

It’s allowing others to do things you would usually have to do yourself, without you.

It’s a misconception that data contracts are just for tabular data.

Sure, they work really well for tabular data in a data warehouse, and that’s where many people start their implementation.

A question I received on a LinkedIn post about change management with data contracts asked (lightly edited for clarity):

I was asked on LinkedIn how I might approach data contracts with dbt.

I have thought a little about how to apply data contracts to dbt targets, but not a lot and I haven’t done this in practice yet.

The whole point of data mesh is to make data in an organisation more accessible.

To build reliable data products we need a data platform that provides us capabilities to do so.