Data producers need to know why
Hey, welcome to August!
In today’s newsletter a short reminder on giving data producers the why when you’re asking them for better quality data.
Also links on being a business first data leader, thinking beyond the warehouse to build AI agents, and extending lineage to the operational plane.
Data producers need to know why
It’s all very well saying that data producers need to do more to provide us better quality data.
But why would they?
They’re busy! There’s a million things they could be doing. Why invest in their data?
Even if they were forced to do it through a top-down directive, they would only do the minimum required to check the task off so they can work on other tasks where they know the value.
That’s where we, as data practitioners, need to be really good at articulating the why:
- What’s the business value we’re providing?
- Why does it align with our organisations goals?
- How can we explain that in terms they understand?
If we can do that well, we can get projects prioritised to improve the data applicability, by talking to the teams directly and/or by engaging with our organisations usual prioritisation process.
Data producers will then be much more incentivised to work with us to meet our shared goals.
Interesting links
Why you should be a business first data leader by Richard Cardigan
In a similar tone to my above post, lead with why and focus on creating tangible value that directly improves business performance.
Why Most AI Agents Won’t Run on Your Warehouse by Sean Falconer
Sean argues that we need more real-time, operational data for agents to make timely and intelligent decisions, and to enable that we need to shift ownership of AI agents from data teams to platform and application teams.
Data Lineage graph for Microservices - with OpenLineage and DataHub by Jan Siekierski (YouTube)
Jan talks about the importance of extending lineage to the operational plane, and shows how it can be done with examples.
Being punny 😅
I had a row with my partner yesterday. It is nice living near a boating lake.
Thanks! If you’d like to support my work…
Thanks for reading this weeks newsletter — always appreciated!
If you’d like to support my work consider buying my book, Driving Data Quality with Data Contracts, or if you have it already please leave a review on Amazon.
Enjoy your weekend.
Andrew