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Vol. I · No. 251
Mon · 8 Jun
A Daily Lexicon of Trustworthy Data
The Lexicon

005·75

shadow pipeline

/ˈʃæd.əʊ ˈpaɪp.laɪn/ - n.

1 [colloq.] The pipeline the org does not know it depends on, discovered the week the person who ran it stops answering.Keep. Punchy.This is the problem.

Working definition

2. An undocumented pipeline built outside the governed platform, often a spreadsheet macro or personal script, that feeds production reporting.

Filed
See also
  • brittle jobA job documented entirely in the muscle memory of the one person who knows which step to re-run first.
  • cron jobA line of asterisks on a server in the closet, quietly running the business since a tenure no one present can confirm.
  • it runs on dave's laptopThe architecture diagram for a critical daily process, redrawn every time Dave takes a vacation.
  • pipeline ownershipA field in the catalog set to the name of someone who left in March.