Data Mesh

Chapter 16. Organization and Culture

Culture eats strategy for breakfast.

Peter Drucker

In Part I of the book, I introduced data mesh as “a sociotechnical approach to share, access, and manage analytical data in complex and large-scale environments—within or across organizations.”

In this chapter I focus on the social side of this sociotechnical approach. I will elaborate on the changes that data mesh introduces to people’s roles, responsibilities, motivations, and collective interactions in an organization.

I will cover a few of the key organizational design choices critical to the implementation of data mesh. I use Galbraith’s Star Model to structure the organizational design choices around the five categories of strategy, structure, processes, rewards, and people. These categories are all interrelated and influence each other, and the sum of all of them results in the emergence of the organizational culture.

Figure 16-1 summarizes the Star Model applied to organizational elements of data mesh.

Figure 16-1. Data mesh organizational design decisions framed by Galbraith’s Star Model

The components of the Star Model include:

Strategy

Data strategy frames and embodies data mesh. In Chapter 15 I covered how a data strategy aligns with the principles and components of data mesh to execute toward a decentralized data ownership that embeds data-driven value generated ...