#104 How Does Data Mesh Impact the Business: Learnings from T-Mobile Polska's Early Journey - Interview w/ Karolina Henzel

Sign up for Data Mesh Understanding's free roundtable and introduction programs here: https://landing.datameshunderstanding.com/Please Rate and Review us on your podcast app of choice!If you want to be a guest or give feedback (suggestions for topics, comments, etc.), please see hereEpisode list and links to all available episode transcripts here.Provided as a free resource by Data Mesh Understanding / Scott Hirleman. Get in touch with Scott on LinkedIn if you want to chat data mesh.Transcript for this episode (link) provided by Starburst. See their Data Mesh Summit recordings here and their great data mesh resource center here.Karolina's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karolina-henzel/In this episode, Scott interviewed Karolina Henzel, Data Enablement Tribe Lead at T-Mobile Polska. FYI, businesses and domains are fundamentally similar in this conversation and are used essentially interchangeably.Some high-level takeaways/thoughts/summarizations from Karolina's view:Business transformation and impact is what really matters. Digital transformation is just a mechanism to transform your business into being more digital native and focused. Data transformation is just a part of digital transformation. Transformation should all come down to driving positive business impact.To drive something like data mesh forward, you really need top management support, likely a C-level executive sponsor. Otherwise, it is very easy for work to get deprioritized and pushed out.Don't take on a large-scale data initiative unless there are specific business challenges to address. Don't do data mesh for the sake of "being data driven"; what are the issues and why will addressing them help your business? Explicitly define the problems and the pain points.To drive change, look for "change agents" in the domains. They are people with the will and capabilities to drive large-scale change. They aren't always easy to find but once you start to identify them, patterns will emerge.The big pain points T-Mobile Polska was facing were: 1) poor/inconsistent data quality; 2) data discovery difficulties; and 3) slow time-to-market for new data and insights.T-Mobile Polska was able to move forward with data mesh because business representatives in the domains were bought in that addressing the data pain points would drive incremental business value - there would be a return on the data work investment.Look for quick wins and how to deliver continuous incremental value. If it is all about producing a big bang, you will very likely lose momentum, prioritization, and funding. Continuous value delivery is crucial to keeping people excited about data work.T-Mobile Polska's data quality issues were caused mostly by a lack of accountability/ownership and not adhering to standard definitions across domains and...

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Interviews with data mesh practitioners, deep dives/how-tos, anti-patterns, panels, chats (not debates) with skeptics, "mesh musings", and so much more. Host Scott Hirleman (founder of the Data Mesh Learning Community) shares his learnings - and those of the broader data community - from over a year of deep diving into data mesh. Each episode contains a BLUF - bottom line, up front - so you can quickly absorb a few key takeaways and also decide if an episode will be useful to you - nothing worse than listening for 20+ minutes before figuring out if a podcast episode is going to be interesting and/or incremental ;) Hoping to provide quality transcripts in the future - if you want to help, please reach out! Data Mesh Radio is also looking for guests to share their experience with data mesh! Even if that experience is 'I am confused, let's chat about' some specific topic. Yes, that could be you! You can check out our guest and feedback FAQ, including how to submit your name to be a guest and how to submit feedback - including anonymously if you want - here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dDdb1mEhmcYqx3xYAvPuM1FZMuGiCszyY9x8X250KuQ/edit?usp=sharing Data Mesh Radio is committed to diversity and inclusion. This includes in our guests and guest hosts. If you are part of a minoritized group, please see this as an open invitation to being a guest, so please hit the link above. If you are looking for additional useful information on data mesh, we recommend the community resources from Data Mesh Learning. All are vendor independent. https://datameshlearning.com/community/ You should also follow Zhamak Dehghani (founder of the data mesh concept); she posts a lot of great things on LinkedIn and has a wonderful data mesh book through O'Reilly. Plus, she's just a nice person: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zhamak-dehghani/detail/recent-activity/shares/ Data Mesh Radio is provided as a free community resource by DataStax. If you need a database that is easy to scale - read: serverless - but also easy to develop for - many APIs including gRPC, REST, JSON, GraphQL, etc. all of which are OSS under the Stargate project - check out DataStax's AstraDB service :) Built on Apache Cassandra, AstraDB is very performant and oh yeah, is also multi-region/multi-cloud so you can focus on scaling your company, not your database. There's a free forever tier for poking around/home projects and you can also use code DAAP500 for a $500 free credit (apply under payment options): https://www.datastax.com/products/datastax-astra?utm_source=DataMeshRadio