Not Just Data is an easy-to-read management novel that describes the story of a team building and then evolving a continuous enterprise data pipeline.
What is a continuous enterprise data pipeline, you ask? Let’s work toward a definition:
- Continuous enterprise data is up-to-date enterprise data available on an as-needed basis, reflecting the changing needs of data consumers.
- Enterprise data is fit-for-purpose data derived from multiple sources across the organization.
- Fit-for-purpose data is high-quality data provided to the right data consumers at the right time and in the right way.
Therefore, a continuous enterprise data pipeline delivers up-to-date, high-quality data from across the organization to the right data consumers on an as-needed, when-needed basis, while reflecting their changing needs over time. That’s a mouthful, which is why I started with the above definitions.
This team was formed because their organization requires continuous enterprise data to support data-informed decision-making and their corporate artificial intelligence (AI) projects. This initiative begins immediately after a visible, multi-year failure that followed a traditional/predictive strategy for building an enterprise data warehouse. The team adopts a Disciplined Agile® (DA) strategy, starting with a Scrum-based way of working (WoW) and eventually evolving it into a lean, continuous-delivery WoW. This enables them to best respond to the changing needs of their stakeholders. They also adopt a Data Vault 2 (DV2)-based architecture because they require a future-proof, scalable, extensible, and auditable pipeline.
More details about Not Just Data: How to Deliver Continuous Enterprise Data:
Why You Want To Read This Book
There are many reasons why you should read this book:
- Continuous enterprise data supports data-informed decision-making.
- Continuous enterprise data supports corporate artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives.
- You need pragmatic ways of working (WoW) with enterprise data to address the increasing BANI/VUCA in your environment.
- Continuous enterprise data makes your data an asset, rather than a liability.
- You want a pragmatic, realistic example of how a data team can overcome the technical and organizational challenges that they face when delivering a continuous enterprise data pipeline.
- You want to learn how to apply DataOps/DevOps-style WoW in an established, enterprise-class setting.
What is a Management Novel?
The approach taken in this book is referred to as creative non-fiction or narrative non-fiction. The book is written as a novel – along the same lines as The Goal and The Phoenix Project – describing the experiences of a data warehousing team tasked with providing continuous enterprise data to their organization.
The setting is BigFinCo, a large financial institution offering banking, insurance, and wealth management services. This is an established organization with an existing technical infrastructure, an existing culture, and competing internal priorities. It isn’t the simple environment of a start-up company where you’re starting from scratch.
The storyline is based on an amalgam of my own experiences and, in some cases, those of my colleagues, helping organizations improve the WoW and WoT around their data activities. Data activities include data profiling, data design, data cleansing, data security, and many more. The plot reflects what I’ve seen happen on real teams; it doesn’t rely on luck, and in fact, a few unfortunate things happen along the way. In other words, a typical IT initiative. Having said this, the usual legal weasel-words still apply: This is a work of fiction, any similarities to real-world organizations or real-world people are mere coincidences, I accept no liability, and if anything goes wrong it’s completely and utterly your fault. Yeah, I think that’s how lawyers word that sort of warning.
Who Is This Book Written For?
This book is written for senior data team members, team leaders, business stakeholders who work with them, and leaders who govern/oversee them. For our purposes, a “data team” may be focused on data warehousing (DW), business intelligence (BI), data analytics, a data product, or a data platform. The team in this book is an enterprise DW/BI team building a continuous enterprise data pipeline. It is written as a management novel to increase its consumability for this audience.
The Table of Contents of Not Just Data
Chapter 1: The Postmortem. After BigFinCo failed by taking a traditional approach to a data warehousing project, they decided to act on the lessons learned. They still need a source of fit-for-purpose data, so they decide to shift gears and adopt an agile WoW and WoT.
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- Introducing the Team
- The Need for Continuous Data
- BigFinCo Faces Real Challenges
- Lean, Non-Invasive Governance
- Lessons Learned From Utopia
- We Need a Fit-For-Purpose Data Architecture
- Deliver Business Value Regularly
- Act on Changing Stakeholder Needs
- Converge Will Be a Governed Self-Organizing Team
- Modern Problems Require Modern WoW
Chapter 2: Forming the Team and Selecting Initial WoW. The team decides to adopt a Scrum-based project approach tailored to the realities of DW/BI. They also identify the skills required for success and conduct a gap analysis to identify where they fall short.
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- What Do We Need to Accomplish?
- Identifying Potential Team Members
- Choosing Their WoW
- Will An Agile WoW Work for Data?
- Governance? Really?
Chapter 3: Getting Going In The Right Direction Part. The team works closely with their stakeholders to identify and prioritize what they need to accomplish, performing just enough initial requirements modeling to do so.
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- Agreeing To Our Overall Goals
- Exploring the User Experience
- Capturing Usage Requirements
- Acceptance Tests as Executable Requirements Specifications
- Identifying Business Concepts
- Capturing Technical Requirements
- Agile Envisioning
- Concluding The Morning Modelling Session
Chapter 4: Getting Going In The Right Direction Part. The team works closely with its stakeholders to identify a viable Data Vault 2.1 architecture, in parallel to the initial requirements model (Chapter 3). The team successfully passes the Common Vision milestone.
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- How Architecture Envisioning and Planning Will Work
- Exploring the Business Architecture
- Identifying Data Sources
- Exploring the Technical Architecture
- Supporting Better, Data-Informed Decisions
- Revisiting The Technical Requirements
- Initial Planning and Guesstimation
- Evolving the Vision
- Agreeing To Our Stakeholder Vision
- Initiation is More Than Envisioning
Chapter 5: Ensuring High-Quality Data. Work begins to adopt modern, agile data/DataOps techniques and technologies to deliver high-quality data at scale. This includes automated data testing, continuous database integration (CDI), continuous database deployment (CDD), adoption of corporate data conventions, and others.
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- Defining Data Quality
- The “Data is the New Water” Metaphor
- Data Vault 2.1 Data Quality Strategies
- Data Quality Strategies for Development
- Validation Against Functional Requirements
- Verification Against Quality of Service (QoS) Requirements
- Parallel Independent Testing
- Automating Data Quality Development Practices
- Agile Quality Gates
- Data Quality Strategies for Fixing Legacy Sources
- Data Quality Techniques for the Organization
- Measuring Data Quality
- Moving Forward
Chapter 6: Addressing Risk Early. Taking a page from Disciplined Agile® (DATM), the team decides to reduce the risk associated with their initiative by addressing common risks early. This includes gaining stakeholder acceptance around a shared vision, proving the architecture via a walking skeleton, and making regular go-forward decisions.
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- Proving the Architecture with Working Code
- We Face Common Risks
- Streamlined Milestone Reviews
- Sprint Planning
- Implementing the Walking Skeleton
- The Proven Architecture Milestone review
Chapter 7: How Enterprise Data Flows Through the Pipeline. The team applies DV2 design patterns to build an initial end-to-end, continuous data pipeline.
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- The Demo
- The Design Review
- The Persistent Staging Area (PSA)
- The Raw Vault
- Implementing Change Data Capture (CDC)
- The Sparse Business Vault
- Supporting Better Decision Making
- Capturing Data Lineage
- Evolving Our Enterprise Metadata
- Detecting and Reporting Data Quality Issues
- Design Reviews and Agile
Chapter 8: Working In Disciplined Sprints. The team gains experience working in two-week sprints and adopts a new, more collaborative and flexible WoW compared with their traditional strategy on the previous project.
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- How the Team Currently Works
- Look-Ahead Data Analysis
- The Definition of Ready (DoR)
- Sprint Planning
- Data Engineering
- Parallel Independent Testing
- The Definition of Done (DoD)
- Sprint Wrap Up
- Dropping Coordination Meetings
- Oversight and Governance via Radical Transparency
- Is the Problem with Sprints?
Chapter 9: Supporting Better-Informed Decision Making. The team supports end-user decision-makers with a combination of business intelligence (BI) strategies, including dashboards, self-service BI, pre-defined reports, and generative AI.
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- End User Support
- Quality In, Quality Out
- Enabling Data Fluency
- Shared Vocabulary
- Effective User Interface (UI) Design
- Designing for Performance
- Better-Informed Decisions
Chapter 10: Deploying Into Production. The team has delivered sufficient value to justify deploying their first release into production and has been directed by their stakeholders to do so. Their adoption of agile data/DataOps techniques significantly reduces the cost and risk of doing so, and the team quickly adopts a continuous deployment strategy.
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- Do We Have Sufficient Functionality?
- Luckily, We Planned for This
- Luckily, We’ve Been Deploying Internally
- Are We Production Ready?
- The Team Commits to a Release Date
- The First Release is Always Rough
- Did We Delight Our Stakeholders?
- Sprinting Towards Continuous Deployment
Chapter 11: Supporting Artificial Intelligence. The team evolves their WoW to support new AI initiatives within BigFinCo.
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- Lessons Learned from Our AI Pilots
- Building AIs
- Question Stories for AI
- Fulfilling AI Stories
Chapter 12: Continuous Enterprise Data Warehousing. New requirements make it clear that incremental releases, even every second week, aren’t sufficient; what BigFinCo really needs is a continuous enterprise data pipeline. The team decides to shift to a more flow-oriented, continuous WoW and adopts a Kanban-based lifecycle. Converge is officially recognized as a long-term program, rather than a short-term project, that produces a valuable infrastructure asset.
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- Agile/Scrum Was a Great Start
- From Project to Product
- Agile/Scrum is Too Clunky Now
- We Need to Stop Working in Sprints
- From Scrum to Continuous Delivery
- DataOps and Continuous Delivery
- Improving Our Analysis Strategy
- Why Do We Want to Deploy Quickly?
- What If Our Stakeholders Don’t Want Releases This Often?
- Why Didn’t We Do This Sooner?
Chapter 13: Measures of Success. BigFinCo describes how it measures the effectiveness of its continuous enterprise data pipeline strategy.
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- Metrics in Practice
- Measuring the Converge Team
- Measuring the Converge Product
- Measuring Data Quality Improvement
- The Metrics Vault
- What Gets Measured Pragmatically
Chapter 14: A Continuous Enterprise Data Pipeline. Senior leadership at BigFinCo reflects on the Converge team’s experiences and identifies the critical success factors of this initiative.
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- Organizational Success Factors
- An Expected Journey
- The Fellowship of the Team
- One Data Strategy to Support Them All
- You Can Do This Too
What Are People Are Saying?
“Not Just Data is essential reading for executives and data leaders who understand that competitive advantage today depends not on having more data, but on consistently delivering the right data, to the right people, at the right time. ” – Dr. Nathaniel P. Crews PhD, Caltech Sr. Technology Instructor & Enterprise Transformation Coach
“With Not Just Data Scott makes a simple but often ignored point: data problems are rarely technical, they’re organizational. Scott shows, through a realistic enterprise story, how shared accountability, continuous delivery, and data quality turn data from a recurring bottleneck into a business capability. In an AI-driven world, this isn’t optional reading, it’s a practical guide for leaders who actually want data to deliver value.” – Pramod Sadalage, Co-author of Refactoring Databases, NoSQL Distilled, Software Architecture: The Hard Parts, and Building Evolutionary Architectures. Author of Recipes for Continuous Database Integration.
“This book makes the lessons and wisdom from decades of experience easily accessible and understandable to both technical and non-technical readers. It will help you build a modern enterprise data team and deliver a modern enterprise data platform that provides high-quality, continuous data for AI and business decisions, regardless of your organization’s industry or scale.” – Kent Graziano, The Data Warrior
“If The Goal taught us to master constraints, and The Phoenix Project and The Unicorn Project modernized our operations and development, Not Just Data solves the final bottleneck: information. Scott Ambler has delivered the missing manual for the BANI age, showing leaders exactly how to clear the ‘Data Debt’ that is holding their AI initiatives hostage.” – Michael Vizdos, Co-author of The Enterprise Unified Process & creator of implementingscrum.com, Focus. #deliver
“I am not a data professional, so I jumped at the chance to read Scott Ambler’s approach on continuous enterprise data. Scott’s technical books are superb, and Not Just Data does not disappoint. The format is unique, and the structure allows the author to iteratively evolve what becomes “The Big Picture of Continuous Data” over the book’s chapters. Executives, tech managers, and developers should read this book carefully, and when you finish, you will be Not Just Data literate, you will be much more valuable to your organization.” – Gary Evans, Author of The Effective Scrum Master: Advancing Your Craft
“I have been a disciple of Scott Amber’s work for well over a decade, learning from his writing and the patterns he has shared around agile ways of working (WoW) and Disciplined Agile. He has long been the OG of bringing agile and data together in a way that is both disciplined and practical, and his thinking has consistently helped turn big ideas into approaches that data teams can actually apply in the real world. I also have a special place on my bookshelf for the novel-style format of The Goal and The Phoenix Project. Scott has taken that novel-driven storytelling style and artfully crafted it for the data domain, bringing complex data ways of working to life in a way that is engaging, relatable, and memorable. Not Just Data brings clarity across people, ways of working, enabling technology, and the data lifecycle from capture through to insight in a way that is both compelling and deeply practical. This is a book that will be gracing a special place on my bookshelf!” – Shane Gibson, Author of “an Agile Data Guide” series
“If you truly want enterprise-level delivery of data value, this book will give you the easy-to-read but nonetheless tough love you may need, and a plan to execute delivery.” – John Giles, Author of the Data Elephant book series
“Not Just Data is not just for data professionals or AI enthusiasts. It is a book for leaders, changemakers, and anybody that cares about a workplace where people can thrive, making sound decisions, and respond with clarifying both today and tomorrow. It’s also good storytelling, and worth a read just to see how it all plays out.” – Jeff Anderson, Author of Organizing Towards Agility
“Not Just Data offers executives a rare gift: a clear, human view into why enterprise data initiatives so often stall – and what changes when organizations treat data delivery as a shared responsibility rather than a technical function. Through story, not prescription, Scott Ambler shows how leadership decisions, operating models, and trust determine whether data becomes a strategic asset or a recurring frustration. This is a practical, accessible book for leaders who want results, not another framework.” – Dan Linstedt, Founder, Data Vault Alliance
“If the last few decades of IT and data messes have taught us anything, it is that you cannot fix data quality in the data team by blindly chasing the next trend. We have moved through data warehouses, lakes, swamps, vaults, fabrics, and meshes, yet the data community still struggles to satisfy the insatiable hunger businesses have for reliable data. It is time to admit that data quality issues are not the root problem. They are a symptom of chaotic application landscapes, which are themselves the result of flawed organizations and unclear accountability. This is why Not Just Data is so important. Scott cuts through the noise to show that the solution lies in holistic Enterprise Design. By seamlessly integrating strategy, organization, processes, and IT application portfolio management, he maps out the only viable path to supporting modern AI initiatives with the data they need. It isn’t easy, but the only way forward. If you are tired of following the herd and want to start delivering actual results, you need to read this book.” – Wolfgang Goebl, President, Intersection Group
“Not Just Data is more than a management novel; it’s a blueprint for enterprise survival in a world increasingly defined by complexity and disruption. Scott Ambler presents a clear and practical path, showing how senior leaders, from mid-level management to the executive suite, have a critical role in the success or failure of their enterprise data and analytics efforts. If executives want accurate answers, they must ask the right questions, stay engaged with their data teams, and create a culture where collaboration between business and data professionals is expected and sustained. The guidance in this book offers organizations a path to reduce risk and deliver meaningful business outcomes through data. What stood out to me is how directly the concepts in this book reinforce and operationalize the foundational principles taught in Data Vault – principles like collaboration, auditability, scalability, and a business-first mindset. It’s why I partnered with Scott for his delivery of a practitioner workshop tied to these ideas – because the story he tells here is not just important, it’s essential; and Scott articulates those principles in ways every organization can learn from and apply.” – Cynthia Meyersohn, President, DataRebels and COO, DataVaultAlliance Holdings
“The best way to learn is by doing! At least that’s what people say. ‘Doing’, however, is often elusive, constrained, and derailed by the unexpected. We always want to do things the right way, yet reality forces us to cut corners, delivering short of expectations. Not Just Data takes us on a journey that accelerates the learning process of doing it right! Scott has given us a brilliant ‘fly on the wall’ viewpoint that immerses the reader into the process of doing, emerging much better prepared than we were at the start. If you want to get things done well, take the time to read this book! There is much to glean, perhaps confirming what you may already know, perhaps coveting sorted perspectives and resolving misconceptions, or at least feeling better that you are not alone.” – Dale T. Anderson, Principal Data Solutions Architect, Intelligent Data Consulting
“Data is everywhere, yet the work behind it is often wrapped in jargon and complexity. Not Just Data is a highly readable and actionable book, perfect for today’s leaders who want a value-oriented approach to enterprise data initiatives and a clear view of the cultural and team-level shifts required for success.” – Laura Brandenburg, Author of The Value-Driven Business Analyst
“Scott has always lived in the real world – not the ideal single-team green field everyone-gets-along world that so many who write about agility seem to live in. In Not Just Data, I found a highly realistic, practical, and up-to-date exploration of the real issues that come up today. There is no over-simplification happening here – this is the real stuff. This is how it really goes down. These are the real issues that come up, and these are real solutions. Deeply informed by today’s issues, from DevOps through AI, this is the book I would recommend to anyone asking, How can my teams and I find the answers to our data-related challenges?” – Cliff Berg, Managing Partner, Agile 2 Academy
“With his customary clarity, Scott offers a lucid reflection and a pragmatic guide to data valuation. ‘Not Just Data’ emphasizes the power of an adaptive Way of Working (WoW) as an active response to data management challenges, prioritizing business value over mere technical execution. Concepts such as Data Fluency and Continuous Enterprise Data Pipeline underscore the urgency of having high-quality, continuously updated data to make truly data-informed decisions, avoiding the pitfalls of unreliable information. The novel recounts these challenges, making them accessible even to non-specialists, and reiterates that the topic must be addressed at all corporate levels, treating data as the ‘New Water’. Scott repeatedly emphasizes how data quality is the only antidote to Artificial Stupidity, recalling the fundamental GIGO principle, a core focus for anyone who, like me, works on developing Intelligent Business Agility. A concrete and pragmatic text that is a must-have, not only for experts but also for those who do not want to find themselves unprepared when putting data at the service of the corporate ecosystem.” – Felice Pescatore, Author of Intelligent Business Agility
“I have followed Scott Ambler’s Agile Data thinking for more than a decade. With Not Just Data, his proven models and principles are finally distilled into a compact, highly readable management novel. An enjoyable read that delivers serious guidance for enterprise-scale data initiatives.” – Raphael Branger, Agile BI Practitioner and Author of How to Succeed with Agile Business Intelligence
“In a BANI world, where organizations struggle to turn data into trustworthy decisions, Not Just Data offers something rare: a pragmatic, disciplined path to continuous enterprise data. For two decades, I’ve known Scott to offer candid and hard-hitting insights to the agile and data domains. Here, he bridges architecture, agility, and governance with clarity and hard-earned wisdom. It is essential reading for leaders who are serious about moving beyond data lakes and dashboards to real, sustained data value, particularly in the age of AI.” – Sanjiv Augustine, Author of From PMO to VMO, Founder & CEO, LitheSpeed Intelligence
“In Not Just Data Scott has again shown his unnerving ability to get straight to the nub of the issues involved, avoiding unnecessary fluff. Scott has written another winner.” – Mark Collins-Cope, Objective View
“If your enterprise is struggling with data management and quality issues, you need to read Not Just Data. This book covers the entire lifecycle from business objectives to requirements, design, and delivery, showing how modern development practices and AI fit into a continuous data model. Scott distills his decades of experience with data architecture and software development, providing you with frank, expert insights and a roadmap for success.” – Kevin Brennan, Business Architect; executive sponsor and development lead of the BABOK Guide.
Where to Buy the Book (Amazon)
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Other Important Stuff
- Formats: Paperback and Kindle
- ISBN: 979-824-3119-21-4
- Published: February 28, 2026
- Current Status: Available now!
- Artificial intelligence (AI) statement: This book contains no AI-generated text nor images. AI-enabled features of my writing tools, in particular Microsoft Word and Grammarly, were used to spell-check and grammar-check my writing.