Data Platform

The more autonomy your data platform promotes, the more our users can get done without involving us directly.

Your data contract tooling should be designed for data producers.

In many organisations, much of the most important data is produced by in-house software.

While a lot of people associate data contracts with data quality (and I did call my book Driving Data Quality with Data Contracts!), one of the problems data contracts is great at helping to solve for is change management.

When building a (data) platform you end up thinking a lot about the abstractions you are providing, and the trade-offs they cause.

What key business processes depend on your data?

Do the owners and users of those processes understand how dependable the data is?

When building a data platform I’m often thinking about how to reduce friction for my users. I want them to have a great experience that allows them to get/build what they need quickly and easily.

Many data platforms start with a change data capture (CDC) service to extract data from an organisations transactional databases - the source of truth for their most valuable data.

How many alerts do you get every day?

And how many of them are actionable?

Data is at the heart of every meaningful service, and it’s the effective use of that data which builds a product, and a business.

David Jayatillake published an interesting post recently titled “We don’t need data contracts”. The title was enough to ensure it caught plenty of attention… but the subtitle more accurately describes what David is arguing for: “We need data to be part of product engineering”.