Preface

Hello, and welcome to Driving Data Quality with Data Contracts! I’m excited to share with you everything I’ve learned about how data contracts solve some of the age-old problems we have in our data architectures, where, despite huge investments, we rarely have easy access to good-quality data that can be used to drive real business value.

This book and the ideas behind it have been three years in the making. It was in August 2020 when I started thinking about the problems I wanted to solve at GoCardless and started calling my solution data contracts, before writing about them publicly for the first time in April 2021, and describing our implementation in December 2021. Since then, they’ve really taken off, with countless articles, presentations, and podcasts around the subject.

Over that time, I’ve been lucky enough to have the opportunity to speak to many people in the data community, at organizations large and small, and through those discussions I have found that while, for each of us, our data is unique, our problems are not! In fact, they’re universal.

Data contracts solve these problems in two ways. The first is the implementation of a contract-backed architecture, which empowers the creation, management, and use of quality data through self-served, autonomous tooling.

The second is by changing our data culture to one where data is generated explicitly to meet use cases, where data generators and data consumers work closely together as partners, and where we focus on the quality of our data, not the quantity.

These go together, and both are required if we’re going to achieve our goal of driving a truly data-driven organization that creates real business value through the effective use of quality data.