Shared foundation and safe environment
On this page
Before an architect starts changing mapping or governance surfaces, they should share the same object model and environment discipline as everyone else.
Learning objective
Build shared fluency in the instance before touching architecture surfaces.
Key ideas
- Start safely — use dev or test for learning and experimentation.
- Use a staged mental model — ingest, clean, and explore data progressively.
- Understand the common object types — source records, golden records, vocabulary, identifiers, and relationships.
- Treat visible data pain as design input — architecture should reduce recurring downstream clean-up.
Practical activities
- Open one business domain and explain how records appear to end users.
- Compare one source record journey to one golden record journey.
- Explain where an architect would look for clues that mapping or model choices are weak.
Expected outcome
The learner knows why architecture work starts from understanding the existing instance, not from writing rules in isolation.