#103 4 Years of Learnings on Decentralized Data: ABN AMRO's Data Mesh Journey - Interview w/ Mahmoud Yassin

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 hereMahmoud's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mahmoudyassin007/In this episode, Scott interviewed Mahmoud Yassin, Lead Data Architect at ABN AMRO, a large bank headquartered in the Netherlands.Some high-level takeaways/thoughts from Mahmoud's view:It's very difficult to do fully decentralized MDM, which led to some duplication of effort - that can mean increased cost and people not using the best data. ABN tackled this through their Data Integration Access Layer - similar to a service bus.They are using that centralized layer - called DIAL - to help teams manage integrations that are both consistently running and on-the-fly. It helps monitor for duplication of work instead of reuse.If Mahmoud could do it again, he'd focus on enabling easy data integration earlier in their journey to encourage more data consumption. Cross domain and cross data product consumption is highly valuable.The industry needs to develop more and better standards to enable easy data integration.Data mesh and similar decentralized data approaches cannot fully decentralize everything. Look for places to centralize offerings in a platform or platform-like approach that can be leveraged by decentralized teams.Most current data technology licensing models aren't well designed for or suited to doing decentralized data - it's easy to pay a lot if you aren't careful - or even if you are careful!A tough but necessary mentality shift is not thinking about being "done" once data is delivered. That's data projects, not data as a product.Try to keep as much work as possible within the domain boundary when doing data work. Of course, cross-domain communication is key but try to limit the actual work dependencies on other domains if possible.A data marketplace enables organizations to more easily create a standardized experience across data products and make data discovery much easier. You don't necessarily have to tie your cost allocation models to the marketplace concept.Sharing what analytical queries/data integration "recipes" people are using has been important for ABN. It drives insights across boundaries and also creates a lower bar to interesting tangential insight...