It’s only by being clear about roles and responsibilities that diverse groups of people can work together effectively and efficiently to realize the goal of extracting the most business value from data. Let’s define the roles of the data generator and the data consumer.

Data consumers

Often, people only think of data consumers as a data practitioner, for example, a data engineer, a BI analyst, or a data scientist. The primary tasks of these professionals require them to consume and work with data, and as such, they are highly reliant on the quality and reliability of that data. But they are not the only data consumers in your organization.

While data consumers cannot be responsible for the quality of the data they use, they do play a major role in shaping that data. They need to be able to articulate their requirements to the data producers and demonstrate the value they can generate through the application of data. They...