Decentralized Data Governance as Part of a Data Mesh Platform: Concepts and Approaches
This work addresses the problem of decentralized data governance for organizations adopting data mesh, but it is incremental as it builds on existing data mesh concepts without introducing a new paradigm.
The paper tackles the lack of coherence in interpreting data mesh concepts and the absence of work on how a data mesh platform facilitates governance, presenting a conceptual model and discussing approaches to drive governance through platform means based on experiences from implementing a fully-functional data mesh platform.
Data mesh is a socio-technical approach to decentralized analytics data management. To manage this decentralization efficiently, data mesh relies on automation provided by a self-service data infrastructure platform. A key aspect of this platform is to enable decentralized data governance. Because data mesh is a young approach, there is a lack of coherence in how data mesh concepts are interpreted in the industry, and almost no work on how a data mesh platform facilitates governance. This paper presents a conceptual model of key data mesh concepts and discusses different approaches to drive governance through platform means. The insights presented are drawn from concrete experiences of implementing a fully-functional data mesh platform that can be used as a reference on how to approach data mesh platform development.