#266 Leveraging Decades of Information Architecture Learnings to Do Data Well - Interview w/ Akins Lawal

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 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.Akins' LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/akinslawal/Schema for Success: https://www.schemaforsuccess.com/aboutIn this episode, Scott interviewed Akins Lawal, a Data Strategist. To be clear, he was only representing his own views on the episode.Some key takeaways/thoughts from Akins' point of view:Far too often in data, people move to build _something_ instead of focusing on building good information architecture specific to the task at hand and the organizational goals and capabilities.Good information architecture isn't about tech, it's about the principles and practices of how you're going to structure your data/information.Keep going back to good product principles in information architecture: your focus should be on what are you trying to accomplish over what are you trying to build.?Controversial?: Organizations need to focus far more on hiring for learning capacity instead of only for current skills. The world is changing too quickly to try to focus on specific skills for many data-intensive jobs.Leadership buy-in ends up being the number one determining factor of success for projects and transformation according to many studies. Trying to proceed - even with the greatest plan ever - without that buy-in greatly reduces the chances of success.Maturity models can be extremely helpful but they sometimes don't tell the full story. Look for pockets of maturity in your organization and see what can be copied/replicated and what can't when improving the maturity of