Daily data contracts tips

Every organisation beyond a startup has multiple teams or groups working together to deliver something of value for the organisation.

Does your organisation view the problems you are solving for as highly valuable and highly critical?

Data is created by various systems and applications owned by various teams. Without attention that will naturally lead to divergent data as they each decide how best to create and model the data they own.

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

AI can do many things. But it wont solve your data quality issues.

If you don’t have the quality of data you need to make a decision, take some action, or improve a business process, AI can’t solve that for you.

Getting started with data contracts doesn’t have to be complex. Here’s 3 steps:

1. Run some proof of concepts

This doesn’t have to be on the most on the most critical dataset you have.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Or put another way, the earlier you manage something, the cheaper it is.

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.

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.