What types of companies adopt data contracts?

As I’ve been starting on my consulting journey I’ve spoken to a lot of companies who are looking to implement data contracts.

They’ve come from a range of industries including finance, healthcare, tech, e-commerce, construction and manufacturing.

They’ve also ranged from large organisations to startups.

These companies don’t have a lot in common, but the problems they are trying to solve are similar, and fall into roughly two areas.

The first area is where they have a company objective to deliver something that requires good quality, reliable data. That could be using the data directly or through the use of AI, and they’ve realised they need to improve their data before they can use it for that deliverable.

The second area is where they have a regulatory need to apply greater governance to their data. That could be to comply with existing or upcoming data and privacy regulations, or where they have other regulatory/compliance needs such as SOC or others more specific to their industry.

Those areas have a lot of overlap, which is why data contracts can be part of the solution to them both.

To improve data quality you often need to assign ownership and responsibility, adopt change management, define SLOs, and so on. The data contract holds that information and allows it to be used to implement checks for ownership, CI for change management, and automatic collection, alerting and reporting for SLOs.

To improve governance and prove compliance you need to categorise data, ensure policies are applied correctly, and keep a log of all changes as evidence for auditors. Again, the data contract holds that information, such as the data categorisation, and allow you to automate your policies, such as data retention, in a way that provides the audit trail you need.

Data contracts are a simple idea, but used effectively can solve a lot of common problems at many different types of companies.