Data Integration & Provenance

• Connectors and data servers exposing systems of record to agents
• Data contracts: schema, freshness and quality guarantees per source
• Lineage from source through transformation to the answer
• Entitlements: row and column security carried through to the agent
• Federated query across warehouses, lakes and operational stores
• Classification of sensitive fields before anything is indexed

Accountable owner

Data Engineering, with Data Governance and Privacy

• Head of Data Engineering — accountable owner
• Data engineer — connectors, contracts, pipelines
• Data steward — source ownership and quality
• Privacy officer — classification, minimisation, retention
• Security engineer — entitlement propagation

Ownership and phase are architectural recommendations, not assessed results.

Connect three sources properly — contract, lineage, entitlements — before connecting thirty carelessly. MCP data servers shorten integration work substantially, but the governance is the slow part, not the plumbing.

Signals to watch

• Freshness against contract per source
• Contract test pass rate
• Entitlement violations detected (target zero)
• Lineage coverage as a share of answers
• Time to honour a deletion request across indexes

Connectors and quality rules can evolve. Data access, freshness, lineage and consent remain enforced at the boundary.

Failure modes

1. The agent inherits broader entitlements than the human it acts for
2. PII copied into vector indexes where deletion obligations cannot be met
3. Stale or silently broken sources answering confidently
4. No lineage, so an incorrect answer cannot be traced to its source

Existing tool and standards snapshot · approximately mid-2026. Examples, not required dependencies; verify current versions before adoption.

Data access and tool execution are different trust boundaries. Reading a governed table and calling an API that moves money should never share one permission model — that separation is why this harness exists apart from Tool, Skill & Sandbox.