#276 Making Self-Service Actually Work Well Safely - Interview w/ Kate Carruthers

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.Transcript for this episode (link) provided by Starburst. You can download their Data Products for Dummies e-book (info-gated) here and their Data Mesh for Dummies e-book (info gated) here.Kate's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katecarruthers/Kate's 'Data Revolution' Podcast: https://datarevolution.tech/In this episode, Scott interviewed Kate Carruthers, Head Of Business Intelligence at the UNSW AI Institute and Chief Data & Insights Officer at UNSW (University of New South Wales). To be clear, she was only representing her own views on the episode.UNSW is not currently implementing data mesh but are preparing to be able to do so. This is a great lesson in building up the capabilities to move forward towards your goals but not rush.Some key takeaways/thoughts from Kate's point of view:Universities can teach us some really interesting perspectives on self-serve. Because universities are such complex organizations and so many departments are involved in deep investigations in very specific areas, they really are the only domain experts. So enabling them to even just own their own data can be very challenging, let alone helping them share with others safely.Relatedly, each academic researcher is essentially a micro-domain themselves with their own ways of working. That just adds to the need to enable freedom in ways of working but still "keep them safe." Scott note: safety was a key theme of the conversation"At the end of the day, data mesh is about controlling the bits that you need to control, and giving people the freedom to do what they need to do, safely.""Technology is kind of the least of your problems." When it comes to data, be prepared to start with some people not even recognizing there is a problem with the current ways of working or a need to improve. Connect their pain to data immaturity to win them over.The best way to win people over is show, don't tell. Show them the power of self-service instead of pitch them on it. Get a PoC going and get people to tangibly see - and hopefully soon touch - your self-service capabilities early.Always look to anchor your data work - especially...