Data as a product
Today, let’s focus on Data Mesh and “Data as a product”!
Data as a Product?
You already heard that the new trend, Data Mesh, is to organize your data to build “Data as a Product”. (Sometimes abbreviated wrongly as “Data product”).
See this concept as a "Product and Design thinking process". You want to understand the problem from the user’s perspective to design a better feature or service and solving your audience’s problem.
So thinking "Data as a Product" will answer the question, “What makes your product useful?”
Since this process requires iterations, it is working well with an Agile approach where you seek a continuous delivery of your working piece (Generally a software but not limited)
I get the concept, what next?
To make your data useful for your audience, your product should have a set of capabilities. What are they?
You have a Data Catalogue to search and explore with useful metadata.
You can find your data in a specific address/location.
Your data are self-described. You have naming convention that can be shared, sample data so users have an idea about the content and as part of the Data Catalogue, you have a list of metadata required by each Persona
You check the Data quality regularly (DQ Dashboards), you can trace your data (Data Lineage) and you know that you can count on Data Owners/Stewards to guide you if needed.
Recommended by LinkedIn
You know how to address your Audience (Persona) correctly and you know how to give them easy and effective tools to navigate into your Data Market Place!
Your data have common standards so they can be used by different systems.
You are focusing on your Business Key/Critical Data Elements (The ones that are key or critical for your business success) and one data element doesn’t need to be linked to others to be valuable.
You put in place an IT security as a set of cybersecurity strategies. (Access rights, Data protection, encryption, backup…)
Data Management
And guess what? All these capabilities are part of the Data Management & Governance area.
As a matter of fact, you can find these points addressed in one of my favorite reference books, the Data Management Body of Knowledge (DMBoK).
Finally, if you are interested in Data Mesh, go directly to the source and read the book “Data Mesh, delivering data-driven value at scale” by Zhamak Dehghani. She is the founder of the Data Mesh concept and she defined these data capabilites.
So stay tuned because DataMesh in our Data Management environment seems to have a long bright sky ahead!
Interesting and a dynamic approach. I might also consider the ownership and management of this asset (i.e. data). Because you need to have someone who is responsible for these valuable assets. Someone who will make sure that the data is up to date, that it is known and used, and what place it has in the business model. This is the person who will manage the lifespan of the data and keep it from going to waste... because when it comes to data solutions, there's a saying: "trash in, trash out."