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

Articulating the value of your data

Now, let’s look at how to effectively articulate the value of your data, and why that is important as we adopt data contracts.

As we discussed in the previous section, we’re explicitly asking the data generators to take on this new role and assigning them that responsibility. By doing this, we are moving the accountability for the quality of data left, upstream from the data engineers and their pipelines. This shift-left approach ensures data quality issues are addressed at source, by those who have the most knowledge of the data and the ability to change the data – the product teams.

If data consumers are going to ask our product teams to do more and incentivize them to do so, they need to be particularly good at articulating the value of our data, and the positive outcomes we are generating for the organization with that data.

This is why we are doing it. Why is it worth the investment in improving data quality? What...