#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...