Product Positioning
Product vs Project
Authoritative Data is a product.
At UTA, it is also considered a long-running initiative.
By product, we mean that Authoritative Data is a collection of components that work together to provide a service to its customers. A product encompasses the entirety of the experience that a customer has when using something we have created in order to help our customer achieve a goal.
Products tend to live a long time. A product is not a project, which has a beginning and an end. Products live indefinitely until they are decommisioned.
Target customer
The customers for the Authoritative Data product are the developers and data engineers at UTA who need access to authoritative data to build applications and services. We treat these internal customers as first-class customers, just as we would treat an external customer.
Components of the Authoritative Data Product
The following components should be considered part of the authoritative data product. Some of these components are software, some are policies, some are services.
Some of these -- in particular the Authorization Service -- may be pulled out of the authoritative data domain and into their own product domains as the product matures.
| Component | Description | |
|---|---|---|
| Doc | ADM Site | This site, and all the pieces (the underlying GitHub repository, GitHub Actions workflows, VitePress, Mermaid, OpenAPI Explorer, etc) that create the documentation component. |
| Model | Data model | The graph data model as specified in the authoritative data documentation |
| Infra | Data storage & Query | The Neo4j AuraDB graph database |
| API | API | The authoritative data subgraph (authoritative-data-subgraph) in UTA's federated GraphQL implementation |
| Governance & Data Management | Data management office (DMO) | The people, processes, and tools that steward the data entities, as well as ensure and report on data quality |
| DMO App | Front end used by the DMO team to manage authoritative data entities | |
| Integrations | Styx | An Event propogation platform, created by the platform engineering team, which is used to enable integrations with Netsuite, Salesforce, Airtable, UTour, and other downstream consumers of Authoritative Data |