Data Platform

When you’ve successfully built an autonomous, contract-driven data platform, you’ll find the number of data contracts explode.

One of the many benefits of a contract-based data platform is that it ensures consistency over how data is created, managed, and consumed across your organisation.

Platforms in general, and data platforms in particular, can be a powerful enabler for an organisation.

It can be tempting to provide a range of tools for your data platform users - tools that fill every niche, so there’s always the “right tool for the job”.

Great data platforms reduce organisational complexity.

They:

• Establish standards, such as processes, interfaces and guidelines, by providing a golden path for teams across the organisation to follow
• Automate tasks, particularly around data governance, allowing users of the platform to focus on what they do best - delivering value
• Ease integration, allowing data to flow between different systems, applications and users seamlessly, preventing silos

Building a platform on data contracts enables each of these.

When delivering on a large project (data contracts, data mesh, or any large project) you need to realise value early and often.

Data is published by many different systems, and as the number of systems increase it’s likely your organisations data will become less standardised over time, with different identifiers, different semantics, and so on.

It’s important to celebrate small wins.

We recently decommissioned a small utility service called subcontractor, which managed some of the resources we create from our data contracts.

Data contracts are typically used to apply change management to data in tables, in a data warehouse.

Implementing data contracts at the platform layer gives it the capabilities needed to enable domain ownership.