Data-sharing agreement register with expiry alerts
Problem
Every feed into the warehouse, a vendor's GPS export, a sponsor's data-sharing agreement, a league's data rights terms, is governed by a document that specifies what fields can be stored, how long, and whether they can be combined with other data. Those documents sit in a shared drive, an inbox, or a lawyer's contract system, disconnected from the pipeline that depends on them. Nobody watches the expiry date. A sponsorship agreement lapses and the connector pulling their fan data keeps running for another two seasons, because the data engineer who built it never saw the contract and the person who signed it does not know which pipeline it covers. It surfaces at the worst point: a renewal negotiation where the vendor points out data has been used past its permitted term, or an audit that finds a live feed with no current agreement behind it.
Product idea
A register of every agreement that governs a feed into the warehouse: which systems and fields it covers, what it permits (retention, combination with other data, onward sharing), an expiry or renewal date, and a named owner. As a date approaches, the tool notifies that owner, and separately notifies the engineer who owns the connector it covers, so the two people who need to know are not relying on each other to pass the message on. An unacknowledged notice escalates after a set number of days. When an agreement lapses without renewal, the tool does not touch the pipeline itself; it produces a clear instruction to pause the connector and a timestamped record of the flag, the escalation, and whatever action followed, for whoever has to answer for it later.
Who it is for
Data engineers who own the pipelines an agreement covers, the Head of data or CRM and CDP manager who owns the agreement itself, sponsored by whoever answers for data compliance across the organisation.
Possible first version
A single register screen: agreement title, systems and fields it covers, permitted retention, expiry date and owner, entered by hand. A status view sorts agreements by days remaining and flags anything inside a set window. Automated email reminders go to the named owner at fixed intervals before expiry, with one escalation step to a second contact if unacknowledged. Every notice and acknowledgement is logged and exportable. Out of scope for version one: reading the agreement document itself, any connection to a contract management or e-signature system, and any automatic pause of the pipeline concerned, which stays a manual step for the pipeline owner.
- Build classification
- Micro-tool
- Rough effort
- 10-day prototype
- Roles involved
- Head of data, Data engineer, CRM and CDP manager
- Relevant to
- Professional club, League office, Federation / governing body, Venue & stadium operator
- Systems in play
- Spreadsheets and shared drives, Pipeline orchestration and scheduling tools, Data catalogues and quality monitoring
- Product framing
- Manage compliance
Questions we get asked
What do we need on day one to get this running?
You need someone who can list the agreements currently governing your live feeds and pull the expiry date and key terms out of each one. That is manual work the first time, done once per agreement rather than once per pipeline, and it is the same information legal or commercial already holds somewhere. The tool does not discover agreements on its own; it only tracks the ones entered. If nobody can produce that list in an afternoon, that gap is worth knowing about before anything else.
Legal already keeps a contracts register. Why do we need another one?
A general contracts register rarely says which warehouse feed or connector a data-sharing clause covers, because that detail belongs to the data team, not legal. This register is narrower on purpose: agreements that govern a live pipeline, cross-referenced to the pipeline itself and to the engineer who owns it. If your existing contracts register already carries that cross-reference to specific pipelines, and someone checks it against renewal dates as routine, this tool adds little. In most organisations the two live in different systems maintained by different teams, which is exactly the gap this closes.
Does this replace the contract management or e-signature system we use for the agreements themselves?
No. The underlying contract stays wherever legal or commercial keeps it, in whatever system handles signature and storage. This tool only tracks the terms relevant to a live data feed, the expiry date and the owner, and links back to where the full document sits. It is a compliance-monitoring layer on top of contracts you already manage, not a replacement for that system.
What happens once an agreement lapses? Does the tool pause the pipeline itself?
No, and that is deliberate. Pausing a connector automatically on a date is a decision with real consequences for a report that depends on it, and version one leaves that call to the pipeline owner. What the tool does is make the lapse impossible to miss: a flag, an escalation if it is not acknowledged, and a record of both, so whoever pauses the feed does it knowingly rather than by accident, and whoever asks later can see it was raised in time.
Is this your workflow?
Tell us one sports workflow that still runs on paper, spreadsheets, WhatsApp or an outdated system. We will map it and show you what a simpler product looks like.
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