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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.

Laura's book, Disrupting Data Governance: https://smile.amazon.com/Disrupting-Data-Governance-Call-Action/dp/1634626532

Laura's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauramadsen/

Moxy Analytics website: https://www.moxyanalytics.com/

In this episode, Scott interviewed Laura Madsen, CEO at Moxy Analytics and author of the book Disrupting Data Governance.

For the purposes of this write-up, when discussing data governance, it refers to the way many large organizations handle data governance at scale - a way that is very rigid and causes bottlenecks. We all know we can't stereotype or group every org together but general trends can be observed.

Some key takeaways/thoughts from Laura's point of view:

1. A big issue with today's data governance is that the concept of data stewards - the people who own the data concepts - is from 30 years ago and hasn't changed much despite the demands and scope changing dramatically.
2. The data governance committee/council structure most organizations use is inherently inflexible and ineffectual. Those making the decisions don't really understand what's happening with the data under the covers and those who do understand have little ability to influence the wider committee outside their own domain. And thus, they become a major bottleneck.
3. Data governance committees can be quite useful if they focus on communication and context exchange rather than driving decisions and work forward.
4. To drive change in your data governance practices, you need to disrupt but not destroy. Start to break down the big picture into much smaller, bite-sized chunks that when you improve on them will incrementally drive value - Agile provides a good framework to approach this.
5. You will absolutely have to throw out a LOT of your current data governance practices - over time - as you replace them with better ways of working. You will need to really evaluate each practice and assess if it will drive value or should be replaced.
6. "Marie Kondo" your data