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

Why we need data governance

We’ll start by discussing what we mean by data governance, what it covers, and why it is needed. Once we have a shared understanding, we’ll look at how we can promote effective data governance through data contracts, and finish by discussing the roles and responsibilities involved.

There are many definitions of data governance, and organizations implement it in different ways. Broadly, it is a combination of people, processes, standards, and technology that supports and promotes data that is accessible, usable, accurate, consistent, secure, and compliant.

The following diagram illustrates the data requirements supported by data governance using a combination of different programs:

Figure 5.1 – Data requirements supported by the different data governance programs

Figure 5.1 – Data requirements supported by the different data governance programs

To gain a better understanding of what data governance is and why we need it, let’s explore the following topics in more detail:

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