Misconception: You Have a Data Mesh or You Don’t – It’s a Journey Folks

One pushback we see regularly is “well, who has deployed data mesh?” Or people in our data mesh community that are embarrassed that they haven’t fully met Zhamak’s vision; can they really say they are doing data mesh?

The answer is to the first question is the original paper on data mesh is from May 2019. The data mesh concept really started to pick up steam around November 2020. Expecting a wholesale change to entire large organizations in that timeframe is bonkers.

The answer to the second question is yes, yes, they can say they are doing data mesh. Can they say they have a data mesh? As argued below, no one should say that.

We LOVE Intuit’s first data mesh post from Tristan Baker (LinkedIn); the title is literally “Intuit’s Data Mesh Journey.” From speaking with Tristan, Intuit understands it is a multi-year strategy to fully embrace data mesh. Companies don’t have the luxury to scrap their entire analytics approach and move to data mesh overnight. It isn’t a switch you can flip! 😀

We believe the general terminology of data mesh will soon change to companies “embracing data mesh” or “doing data mesh” instead of “having a data mesh.” Data mesh is a concept, not an app or a piece of technology.