Concentrate responsibility

The more places you back up your data, the lower the risk of data loss.

The more people you entrust a secret to, the greater the risk of a leak.

Some systems are made stronger as more agents are involved whereas others are made more brittle. Contract databases are part of the second group.

The more people you involve in its population and maintenance, the more likely it is that someone is going to do a bad job.

All it takes is to see a few examples of missing or incomplete data in one place for your team to lose trust in the whole thing. Then the issue compounds because people are less motivated to maintain a broken system.

Concentrate responsibility for data quality and completeness across as few people as possible. Ideally one.

Doesn’t that incur the risk of having a single point of failure? Absolutely. This is why you create and maintain a blueprint that explains exactly how the database works.