#33 10 Reasons Why You Aren’t Ready for Data Mesh Article – Interview w/ Thinh Ha

Feb 28, 2022

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Twitter: @thinh_ha / https://twitter.com/thinh_ha

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/%E2%98%81%EF%B8%8F-thinh-ha-58945969/

Medium post: https://medium.com/google-cloud/10-reasons-why-you-should-not-adopt-data-mesh-7a0b045ea40f

In this episode, Scott interviewed Thinh Ha, Strategic Cloud Engineer at Google Cloud Professional Services. To be clear, Thinh was only representing his own views and was not representing Google/GCP in any way.

Scott had asked Thinh to be on after Thinh wrote a post on Medium called 10 Reasons Why You Should Not Adopt Data Mesh (later changed to 10 Reasons Why You Are Not Ready to Adopt Data Mesh). While Thinh is a self-professed "believer" in data mesh, he brings up a number of very reasonable checklist/self-check reasons you wouldn't be ready to move towards data mesh yet.

Scott and Thinh go down each of the 10 objections/reasons through the episode and it is advisable to read the article before proceeding. You can see the high level reasons below. There are a lot of very valuable insights into each of the reasons that could make this a 5 page summary so just listen to the episode instead ;)

1. You are not operating at a scale where decentralization makes sense

2. You do not have a strong business-case for how adopting Data Mesh will deliver business value for individual business units

3. You treat Data Mesh as a technical solution with a fixed target rather than an operating model that continuously evolves over time

4. Your organizational culture does not empower bottom-up decision-making

5. You do not have clearly established roles & responsibilities and incentive structure for distributed data teams

6. You do not have a critical mass of data talent

7. Your data teams have low engineering maturity

8. You expect to find off-the-shelf software to help you adopt Data Mesh

9. You do not have buy-in to “shift-left” security, privacy, and compliance

10. You do not consider Data Governance to be a core activity to be prioritized against other activities in every data team’s backlog

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