Book Image

Driving Data Quality with Data Contracts

By : Andrew Jones
Book Image

Driving Data Quality with Data Contracts

By: Andrew Jones

Overview of this book

Despite the passage of time and the evolution of technology and architecture, the challenges we face in building data platforms persist. Our data often remains unreliable, lacks trust, and fails to deliver the promised value. With Driving Data Quality with Data Contracts, you’ll discover the potential of data contracts to transform how you build your data platforms, finally overcoming these enduring problems. You’ll learn how establishing contracts as the interface allows you to explicitly assign responsibility and accountability of the data to those who know it best—the data generators—and give them the autonomy to generate and manage data as required. The book will show you how data contracts ensure that consumers get quality data with clearly defined expectations, enabling them to build on that data with confidence to deliver valuable analytics, performant ML models, and trusted data-driven products. By the end of this book, you’ll have gained a comprehensive understanding of how data contracts can revolutionize your organization’s data culture and provide a competitive advantage by unlocking the real value within your data.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Part 1: Why Data Contracts?
4
Part 2: Driving Data Culture Change with Data Contracts
8
Part 3: Designing and Implementing a Data Architecture Based on Data Contracts

Using data contracts to change an organization

We’ll start by understanding how we can use the adoption of data contracts to change an organization. We’ll learn about the two major roles involved in the extraction of value from data, and how they both need to change if we are to achieve our objectives.

It’s important to keep in mind that data contracts are not just about implementing some tooling and defining a new architecture. If we want to make cultural changes, as we discussed in Chapter 2, Introducing Data Contracts, we need to change how people within the organization work with data.

In fact, I’d say data contracts are about affecting and facilitating this change in culture than the technology and how it is implemented.

There are two distinct roles we refer to in the context of data contracts:

  • Data generator: The people generating data intended to be consumed by one or more data consumers. They often work in a product engineering team...