#276 Making Self-Service Actually Work Well Safely - Interview w/ Kate Carruthers

Please Rate and Review us on your podcast app of choice!Get involved with Data Mesh Understanding's free community roundtables and introductions: https://landing.datameshunderstanding.com/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. Get in touch with Scott on LinkedIn.Transcript for this episode (link) provided by Starburst. You can download their Data Products for Dummies e-book (info-gated) here and their Data Mesh for Dummies e-book (info gated) here.Kate's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katecarruthers/Kate's 'Data Revolution' Podcast: https://datarevolution.tech/In this episode, Scott interviewed Kate Carruthers, Head Of Business Intelligence at the UNSW AI Institute and Chief Data & Insights Officer at UNSW (University of New South Wales). To be clear, she was only representing her own views on the episode.UNSW is not currently implementing data mesh but are preparing to be able to do so. This is a great lesson in building up the capabilities to move forward towards your goals but not rush.Some key takeaways/thoughts from Kate's point of view:Universities can teach us some really interesting perspectives on self-serve. Because universities are such complex organizations and so many departments are involved in deep investigations in very specific areas, they really are the only domain experts. So enabling them to even just own their own data can be very challenging, let alone helping them share with others safely.Relatedly, each academic researcher is essentially a micro-domain themselves with their own ways of working. That just adds to the need to enable freedom in ways of working but still "keep them safe." Scott note: safety was a key theme of the conversation"At the end of the day, data mesh is about controlling the bits that you need to control, and giving people the freedom to do what they need to do, safely.""Technology is kind of the least of your problems." When it comes to data, be prepared to start with some people not even recognizing there is a problem with the current ways of working or a need to improve. Connect their pain to data immaturity to win them over.The best way to win people over is show, don't tell. Show them the power of self-service instead of pitch them on it. Get a PoC going and get people to tangibly see - and hopefully soon touch - your self-service capabilities early.Always look to anchor your data work - especially...

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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