Most data talk assumes you are starting fresh. You are not. You have three warehouses that disagree about what “customer” means, a lake that mirrors all three, and a dashboard from 2019 the CFO still trusts more than yours. The greenfield is a myth. Your landscape is a brownfield, and, I promise, that is fine.
This is a pragmatic playbook for using data contracts and data products to close the gap between the people who ship data and the people who needed it yesterday, with no rip-and-replace project and no pretending your stack is new.
We will work from the latest Open Data Contract Standard (ODCS v3.2.0), including its new context block for AI and semantic interoperability, so the same contracts that keep your humans honest also make your data legible to AI. Expect open standards from the Linux Foundation’s Bitol project, an adoption path you can start Monday, and zero slides telling you to “be data-driven.” Coffee and pizza encouraged. This is Detroit, after all.