The bystander effect on data ownership and responsibility

Hey friends 👋

Today I write about the bystander effect that happens when ownership and responsibility is unclear.

There’s also links to a data contract-driven data mesh, why data engineers should care about knowledge graphs, and support for graphs in BigQuery.

The bystander effect on data ownership and responsibility

The bystander effect is a social phenomenon where individuals are less likely to offer help to a victim when other people are present.

It happens because the presence of others can lead to diffusion of responsibility, where individuals feel less accountable since others are available to help.

We see the bystander effect happening within organisations too.

For example, if a piece of data doesn’t have a single owner, no one will take responsibility to resolve any issues with that data or invest in improving the reliability of that data.

Similarly if an alert is sent to many people then often no one will take responsibility to investigate and resolve that alert. After all, they’re busy with their own stuff - the stuff they explicitly do own.

Ensuring clear, single ownership and responsibility is the key to avoiding the bystander effect.

Interesting links

From Monolith to Contract-Driven Data Mesh by Corné Potgieter

Nice writeup with practical examples.

Data Engineer! Why should you care about Knowledge Graphs? by Veronika Heimsbakk

There’s plenty of articles and posts that state we need knowledge graphs, but this is one of the few explaining the problems they solve.

BigQuery Graph Series | Part 2: (Tutorial) Build a BigQuery Graph from unstructured data by Rachael Deacon-smith

Staying with the graph theme, BigQuery now has preview support for graph structures.

Being punny 😅

My friend and I entered a competition to win a lifetime’s supply of moisturiser. He won, and now he keeps rubbing it in.

Thanks! If you’d like to support my work…

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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.

🆕 I’ll be running my in-person workshop, Implementing a Data Mesh with Data Contracts, in June in Belgium. It will likely be only in-person workshop this year. Do join us!

Enjoy your weekend.

Andrew