And how to avoid falling into the same traps — Everywhere we go in the cloud data space today, we’re hearing one message loud and clear: “you should be thinking about data governance”. It’s a sentiment that we wholeheartedly endorse, but we like to take it a little bit further — you should be thinking about data governance differently. In…

The data gatekeeper is dead, long live the…oh no what have we done? — A silent alarm rings in my head whenever I hear someone utter the phrase, “data is everyone’s responsibility.” You can just as easily translate this to mean that “data is no one’s responsibility,” too. This, readers, is what I call the “data tragedy of the commons.” Here’s why. The term…

Even with the most well-designed data platforms, systems will break. Without embracing risk, you’re playing with fire. — Say it with me: broken data is inevitable. It doesn’t care about how proactive you are at writing dbt tests, how perfectly your data is modeled, or how robust your architecture is. The possibility of a major data incident (Null value? Errant schema change? Failed model?) that reverberates across the…

Or, defining what success looks like for data leaders — As analytics professionals, we deal in data: serving ad-hoc reports on a minute’s notice, pulling queries for executives, and generally forecasting company performance across a variety of metrics. But how can we be truly successful if we don’t measure our own performance, too? In this article, we discuss six important…

Self-serve systems are a big priority for data leaders and a principle of nearly every modern data strategy, but what exactly does it mean? — Data self-service, the ability for stakeholders in the organization to answer their own business questions with data, is a top initiative for nearly every data leader I’ve spoken to this year. It’s so foundational to creating a data-driven organization, that most of the questions surrounding it focus on the “when”…

What are data contracts and do they make sense for your organization? — Forward: A Data Engineering Movement Afoot? We ran into Andrew, a team lead and senior engineer at GoCardless, at our London IMPACT event. He talked about implementing data contracts and how GoCardless has eschewed what has started to solidify as the industry standard ELT modern data warehouse approach. This approach typically involves complex pipelines, large…

Innuendo aside, “big” data is getting smaller and faster. Data leaders need to adjust to the new paradigm. — At some point in the last two decades, the size of our data became inextricably linked to our ego. The bigger the better. We watched enviously as FAANG companies talked about optimizing hundreds of petabyes in their data lakes or data warehouses. We imagined what it would be like to…

When it comes to building a category, it’s all about your customers. Here’s our vision for the future of reliable data. Four years ago, I was leading a data team at Gainsight, a customer success company, responsible for generating the analytics that powered our executive dashboards. I was regularly getting…

The data steward has an impossible job. Here’s why and what we can do to empower them. — In his seminal 2017 blog post, The Downfall of the Data Engineer, Maxime Beauchemin wrote that the data engineer had the worst seat at the table. Data technology and teams have changed tremendously since that time, and now the Preset CEO and creator of Apache Airflow and Apache Superset has…