Contracts, ownership, lineage, and quality instrumentation — the production-grade machinery that turns a fragmented data estate into an auditable asset your board, regulator, and AI models can all rely on.
The trust deficit
PowerPoint frameworks don't move data quality. Live contracts, enforced lineage, and automated quality gates do — and their absence costs measurably every quarter.
The six dimensions of quality
Every critical data domain gets scored along these dimensions. Thresholds are agreed with the business owner; breaches route to them, not the engineering queue.
Values match the ground truth in the source system.
Measured as
Match rate to system-of-record
Required attributes are populated at a known threshold.
Measured as
% fill for mandatory fields
The same entity reads identically across domains.
Measured as
Cross-domain entity drift
Data arrives within the SLA the consumer needs.
Measured as
Freshness p95 latency
Each real-world entity appears exactly once.
Measured as
Duplicate rate per 10k
Values conform to format, range, and business rules.
Measured as
Constraint violation rate
Anatomy of a data contract
Every critical dataset is shipped with a contract: schema, owner, SLA, quality thresholds, and breach behaviour. CI refuses merges that violate it. Consumers can trust it without asking a human.
dataset: customer
version: 2.1.0
owner:
domain: customer-360
steward: a.mackenzie@claritas
escalation: cdo@claritas
schema:
customer_id: { type: uuid, required: true }
email: { type: string, pii: true, format: email }
created_at: { type: timestamp, required: true }
lifetime_value:{ type: decimal, min: 0 }
quality:
completeness: { email: ">= 0.98" }
uniqueness: { customer_id: "== 1.0" }
timeliness: { freshness_p95: "< 15m" }
validity: { email_format: ">= 0.995" }
sla:
availability: 99.9%
deprecation: 90 days
on_breach: page_owner + freeze_downstream
privacy:
classification: restricted
retention: 7y
jurisdictions: [EU, UK, US]Before / after
The programme, in five stages
A DAMA-DMBOK-benchmarked diagnostic across six dimensions of governance maturity. Includes data-estate inventory, lineage sampling, and a scored heatmap that becomes the programme's baseline.
Outputs
A real incident, replayed
One morning at a previous client: a CRM product team shipped a schema change at 09:00. Here is how it played out.
Upstream CRM schema change silently removes a required field.
Contract check in CI fails the pull request.
Domain steward is paged; downstream consumers are frozen.
Steward approves a deprecation window for consumers.
Patched schema merges with backfill plan. Consumers unblock.
Without governance: 9 days to detection via a wrong board metric.
Capabilities
Next step
We run a free, two-week governance diagnostic — maturity score, three quick wins, and a sequenced 18-month plan. No deck, no sales pitch, no obligation.