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

Feeding data back to the product teams

As mentioned earlier in this chapter in the Who is a consumer, and who is a generator? section, although we often think of a data consumer as a data practitioner (for example, a BI analyst or a data scientist), they’re not the only ones who consume data. In fact, product teams, and the services they create, are perhaps the largest and most important data consumers in your organization.

These services do not exist in isolation. They all take some data as input, perform some process or take some action, and return new data as output. And when it comes to input data, they have the same expectations as any other data consumer. They need to understand what data is available, how it is structured, and any other context around the data. They need to know how dependable, correct, and available that data is. They need to know where that data comes from, who owns it, and the support levels being provided.

Often, these services make data available...