Who buys data contract tooling?

Data contracts are often considered as a solution to improve the change management and quality of an organisations data.

As I mentioned yesterday, much of that data is produced by software engineering teams, and so they are the target users of this solution.

However, the teams most affected by those problems - and the ones looking for a solutions - are the data teams.

So, the buyer of the tooling is not the same person as the user.

That can be a problem.

If you’re developing a data contract tool you intend to sell, you want to optimise it for the buyer. Which means you focus on their experience.

Meanwhile, the user is of secondary importance (or lower), and may not get the experience they want.

This is the same reason why as a user you think all accounting and HR software is rubbish. You’re not the customer, the accounting team or the HR team is.

It’s not impossible to build both a good experience for the buyer (data teams) and the users (software teams) - but it is more difficult.

If you want data contracts to change the organisation’s culture then you must have both.