Quality and Innovation

Earlier this year, the people who (rightly) decided the “collective we” needed better tools to manage all our spaghetti SQL (dbt) acquired the “semantic layer” company, Transform. In one of the merger announcements, I read this:

Imagine instead that you could disentangle metric definition from visualization. In this world, the teams that own metrics would be able to define them once, in a way that’s consistent across dashboards, automation tools, sales reporting, and so on. Let’s call this “Headless BI”.

https://www.getdbt.com/blog/dbt-acquisition-transform

Whoaaaa…. I thought. Imagine!! I can’t imagine, because to me, disentangling happens in the architecture and design stages, and then governance keeps things disentangled over time. But adopting solid habits and practices takes time and dedication that many don’t have (or get bored with).

Just how many “data stack companies” exist because people who work in data have (probably accidentally) ignored separation of concerns, and over a course of years, backed into a problematic architecture? How many of these companies have hit the “non-signal $10M” by convincing prospects that they can buy way out of technical debt by signing just one check?

Probably a lot. But they’ll soon find out that “there is no instant pudding.” — W. Edwards Deming