Jaco van der Laan

Lineage & governance

Sociotechnical Modeling

Data modeling is a social practice and a technical one at once.

Modeling is half social — business stakeholders negotiating what things mean — and half technical — engineers encoding that meaning into versioned code and tests. Treat only one half and the model fails: pure-technical models miss the meaning, pure-social ones never ship. The conversation is part of the engineering, not a prelude to it.

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