Daily data contracts tips

We often talk about the value the data function creates.

So often in fact, that it sometimes feel like we’re trying too hard to justify ourselves!

You try your best to work around the poor quality data you’re given.

Only to deliver a poor outcome to your users.

Next Thursday I’ll be discussing data contracts and how they pave the way for effective enforcement on a webinar hosted by STRM.

I enjoyed this post from Nicole Radziwill, PhD on LinkedIn:

How fragile are your pipelines? Start with this simple metric: COUNT THE JOINS. Every time you have to join, you’re making multiple assumptions about the underlying raw data, the biggest one being: you’re assuming it’s not going to change.

If you’re a software engineer, and an upstream dependency is unreliable, then you would speak to the team who owns that dependency.

The data contract must be owned by the data producer.

Only they have the full context on the data, what it’s purpose is, and its limitations.

We’re very lucky these days that it’s so easy to connect with people around the world to collaborate and share ideas. It’s this that allows us to move and improve more quickly than ever before.

If you want to improve the quality of the data

Then you’ll need to speak to the producer of the data.

Following on from yesterdays post about measuring for reporting and measuring for action, one data-driven initiative I’m working on is our FinOps program.

Recently I’m finding it useful to split some of the data-driven initiatives I’m working on into two parts: measure for reporting, and measure for action.