Defining the governance and controls
In Chapter 5, Embedding Data Governance, we discussed the importance of data governance and how we embed those controls alongside the data. We also spoke about how the responsibility of those controls is assigned to the data generators, supported by a central data governance committee through policies, standards, and tooling.
In this section, we’ll look at exactly how we can define the governance and controls in the data contract.
Every data contract must have an owner. This is the data generator, and it is they who take on the responsibilities and accountabilities we discussed in Chapter 4, Bringing Data Consumers and Generators Closer Together.
Depending on your requirements, you might want to embed some of the following in your data contract:
- The version number of the contract
- The service-level agreements (SLAs)
- How to access the data (for example, is the interface a table in a data warehouse, a topic on a stream...