Daily data contracts tips

Writing code. Modelling data. Building transformations.

That’s the easy part.

The hard part is using all of that to deliver meaningful value to your organisation.

More than anything else, your success is determined by your communication.

That includes:

• Using different formats for different results (newsletters, workshops, tech talks, meetings, etc)
• Celebrating success, and admitting where you got things wrong
• Building relationships with people in different teams and roles
• Using the right language for the audience

You could have the best platform, but without communication your adoption of data contracts, or any transformation, will not be a success.

One of our aims with data contracts was to move away from our existing Change Data Capture (CDC) architecture, where the entire database is synced to the data warehouse with exactly the same structure.

A reader recently asked me: What organisations can benefit from a data mesh?

I’d say almost all organisations can benefit from moving in the direction towards a data mesh, where you are starting to provide self-service tools and start to apply more discipline to your data through data contracts.

There’s a limit to what you can do with a fully centralised data team.

A centralised team will never have the capacity to make all data accessible. So, only the most important datasets will be of decent quality to be truly accessible to most of the organisation. The rest will be inaccessible.

The goal of every data architecture has always been to provide accessible data to the organisation.

Data contracts help bring people together.

They increase the visibility of the what data you have, who is using it, and what for.

The whole point of enabling self-serve is autonomy.

It’s allowing others to do things you would usually have to do yourself, without you.

Rather than wait for high-value projects to come in through your ticket system. Go out and find them.

Many data projects require investment over the long run.

It might be a transformation project, like moving towards a data mesh.