Data contracts won't work

Some people argue data contracts won’t work in their organisation.

When asked why, the most common response is “our data producers wouldn’t accept it”.

How do they know?

If you can clearly articulate the problems your data teams are having (broken pipelines, time spent firefighting and not delivering, data doesn’t meet the requirements, etc) and the problems that causes the business (unable to deliver data applications, rising costs, wasted data engineering time, etc) then people will want to know what the solution is.

Then you can propose a solution that ultimately saves cost and improves outcomes, maybe by reassigning some work to be done earlier (i.e. shift eft), maybe by starting projects that improve data quality/management, and so on.

It’s just a communication problem.

Most people struggle to communicate like that, and I understand why - it’s not easy! - but it is essential if you want to have outsized impact within an organisation and push through the change required to do so.