Who is a consumer, and who is a generator?

We’ve spoken a lot about the consumers and generators of data in this book, but what exactly do people in these roles do? What do they care about? What are their requirements, and what are their expectations?

In the following subsections, we’ll look at both roles in more detail, starting with the data consumers.

Data consumers

A data consumer is a person, a team, or a service that consumes data to inform and/or take some action. Typically, we think of data consumers as a data practitioner – for example, a data engineer, a BI analyst, or a data scientist. Their primary tasks require them to consume and work with data, and as such, they are highly reliant on the quality and dependability of that data.

However, they are not the only data consumers in your organization. There are an increasing number of people who are not data practitioners but are data literate. They are comfortable using a data analysis tool...