In Data Contracts in Practice, seasoned business-IT strategist Ryan Collingwood draws on over 20 years of cross-functional expertise in product management, data analysis, and software development to offer a transformative approach to managing complex data ecosystems in organizations of all sizes. He introduces data contracts as a powerful tool for formalizing expectations, roles, and guarantees of data exchange across domain boundaries and organizational structures, whether centralized or decentralized. Through real-world examples in retail customer marketing segmentation, you'll navigate the entire data contracts lifecycle—from creation to deployment and enforcement, covering essential topics such as requirements gathering, quality assurance, and change management, equipping you with the skills to integrate data contracts in your continuous development cycle. You'll integrate data contracts into existing workflows, addressing the perspectives of both data producers and consumers, and learn proactive strategies for identifying and addressing data drift, ensuring your data management practices remain robust and adaptable. By the end of this book, you’ll be prepared to tackle data challenges with a techno-social approach that balances system-level control and organizational alignment, to build solutions that are both useful and used.
