5 Ways You Can Empower Teams with Data Mesh Governance

In today's world, businesses understand how important it is to scale their operations efficiently. They also know that relying on outdated data management methods or traditional data structures can lead to problems such as slow data processing, inflexibility and limited scalability. And this could prevent them from achieving their desired results.

A data mesh approach offers a different, decentralized way to organize data. With this approach, each business domain closest to the data owns and manages it like a product. This allows users throughout the organization to access the data without relying on centralized IT teams. This approach can enable faster access to more reliable data, making organizations more data-driven and agile.

Insider Tip: Join Informatica experts as they share insights, critical considerations and real-world success stories in How to Unleash Data-Driven Transformation With Data Mesh. 

Individual domains can manage, improve and share their data when they own it. This helps decrease the workload of centralized teams. However, companies need to ensure that domain teams can work independently while still following guidelines for scalability and interoperability.

This is where federated data mesh governance plays a crucial role.

The idea of data mesh governance is simple. It provides a way to balance decentralized data control with centralized enterprise data governance for consistent data use.

Successful federated data governance requires organizations to equip their distributed data teams with essential data management capabilities. These capabilities enable effective management, storage, processing, analysis and data sharing across decentralized domains.

Expert Tip: The Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) offers comprehensive solutions across data integration, master data management, data governance, data quality, data marketplace and more to provide a scalable, one-stop solution for data mesh.

Let’s examine the critical capabilities needed to succeed in data mesh governance.

1)  Data Discovery and Classification – Finding relevant data assets in data mesh can be challenging due to a growing number of domains. Without proper data discovery and classification capabilities, domain teams may struggle to find the most relevant and accurate data sets, leading to isolated data silos, duplicated efforts and distrust in data. 

Expert Tip: Informatica’s AI-powered CLAIRE copilot capabilities help generate classifications for distributed data owners to identify and classify large volumes of data automatically and allow teams to help ensure the visibility and accessibility of their data assets.

2) Data Lineage Tracking – When multiple teams work together to manage and publish data, it’s essential to have accurate data lineage. This means knowing where the data came from, how it was processed and how it can be used. Without this information, data producers may struggle to combine data from different sources, and data consumers may not trust the resulting data products.

Expert Tip: Informatica provides comprehensive data lineage so that users across data domains can track data as it moves across source systems, processes and applications.

3) Integrated View of Data Quality – Having accurate and reliable data in a data mesh architecture is crucial. Companies should provide integrated data quality solutions for domain teams to ensure compliance with centralized standards and domain-specific details. Teams need a tool to identify anomalies, take corrective actions and monitor data products for optimal performance. Data consumers can use profiling details and quality scores to make informed decisions about data reliability.

Expert Tip: Informatica Cloud Data Quality, a service of IDMC, offers a single pane of glass for domain teams to oversee data quality. This helps to ensure that centrally established guidelines are in sync with domain-specific metrics.

4) Automated Data Governance – As more data domains are added to the data mesh, it becomes impossible to enforce compliance with data governance policies manually. To make modern data governance work in a federated setup, companies need a technology-driven approach to manage and enforce data policies, data quality, data security and compliance across multiple autonomous domain teams. By automating data governance workflows and policy enforcement, enterprises can help maintain data integrity without overwhelming domain teams with resource-intensive administrative tasks that are hard to scale.

Expert Tip: Informatica Cloud Data Governance and Catalog, a service of IDMC, helps domain teams follow standardized policies and regulations through automated data governance tools. It also lets data producers manage their data products based on their business needs while following organizational data governance principles.

5) Governed Data Marketplace – The idea behind data mesh is to make data easier for people in different organizations to access and use strategically. Domain teams, who are experts in curating high-quality data products, need a data exchange platform that speeds up and streamlines the process of data democratization. Without a governed data marketplace, it’s possible that people won’t be able to find the data they need, and they’ll still be dependent on central teams. There won’t be any oversight on the quality, security or compliance of the data products that are published and used. Ultimately, this can lead to a loss of trust and slow adoption.

Expert Tip: Informatica Cloud Data Marketplace, a service of IDMC, offers a centralized, self-service data platform for data consumers to find, access and utilize data products curated and contributed by data domain owners.

Implementing a data mesh approach involves technological intervention and organizational culture shift. Organizations must adjust their data strategies, redefine ownership and restructure data processes to help ensure that accurate, reliable and trustworthy data supports the data mesh.

Implementing data governance is an effective way for organizations to optimize their data. This strategy involves establishing guidelines for managing data, assigning roles and responsibilities, setting standards and ensuring compliance. It allows for flexibility within domain teams and enables organizations to fully leverage the value of their data.

Discover how to deliver trusted data products and drive better outcomes with data mesh governance.

Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud offers a comprehensive suite of capabilities to help you scale your digital business. Join our webinar on September 14 at 9 a.m. PDT / 12 p.m. EDT to explore how you can bring a governance-centric approach to life.