#226 Learnings From Implementing Data Mesh at a Large Healthcare Company - Interview w/ Mike Alvarez

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. You can download their Data Mesh for Dummies e-book (info gated) here.Mike's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/2mikealvarez/In this episode, Scott interviewed Mike Alvarez, Former VP of Digital Services leading the data mesh implementation at a large healthcare distribution company. He's now working on his own startup.Some key takeaways/thoughts from Mike's point of view:Lean in to the new value-creating possibilities that can come from empowering thousands of your colleagues to leverage data.As an industry, we have to learn to do data work in an incremental fashion. It's not been the norm and it can break people's perception of data work but it's crucial to get where we want to go.You can drive data mesh buy-in from domains by showing them the freedom they will have. Autonomy, empowerment, going at their own speed, etc. can get many to lean in.Advice to past data mesh self: Early in your journey, you can share your vision until the cows come home and people will say they understand - and probably think they understand - but it's incredibly easy to get misaligned. Really focus on what you are trying to achieve. What are the target outcomes?Similarly, it will be harder than you expect to drive buy-in. Many people say that but it's still going to probably be harder than you expect after hearing that :)We need to move away from old approaches to data for large companies because the sheer scale of initiatives ends up creating bloat and risk factors unto themselves. Small and nimble gives us much quicker time to value delivery and builds to much greater outcomes.Shadow IT develops to try to move at the speed of business for domains. But it's rarely scalable or robust enough to even support the domain in the...