Assigning responsibility and accountability

Now that we have defined the roles, we need to specify the responsibilities and accountabilities of each role. This ensures that everyone knows what is expected of them and allows them to work most effectively together.

We’ll start with the data generators. As we discussed in the previous section, many of them didn’t realize they were data generators. Therefore, those responsibilities were taken by the data engineering team who built the pipelines that extracted the raw data from upstream services.

This data engineering team became accountable for the reliability of the data, even though they were not involved in how it was generated or how the structure of the data evolved. This team was very reactive to upstream changes and did their best to try and limit the impact of those changes. However, there is only so much they can do, and there’s no quick fix you can deploy if the generator upstream suddenly stops writing...