Category: Organisational Design

  • 22 rules of generative AI

    22 rules of generative AI

    Thinking about adopting, incorporating or building generative AI products? Here are some things to think about, depending on your role or roles. I assume you’re bringing your own product idea(s) based on an understanding of an opportunity or problems for customers. These rules therefore focus on the solution space. Solutions with generative AI typically involve…

  • Data Mesh Radio

    Data Mesh Radio

    I joined Scott Hirleman for an episode (#95) of the Data Mesh Radio podcast. Scott does great work connecting and educating the data mesh community, and we had fun talking about: Fitness functions to define “what good looks like” for data mesh and guide the evolution of analytic data architecture and operating model Team topologies…

  • Data mesh: a lean perspective

    Data mesh: a lean perspective

    Data mesh can be understood as a response to lean wastes identified in data organisations. I paired with Ned Letcher to present this perspective at the LAST Conference 2021, which was much delayed due to COVID restrictions. Lean wastes including overproduction, inventory, etc, may be concealed and made more difficult to address by centralised data…

  • The Business Case for Data Mesh

    The Business Case for Data Mesh

    I collaborated with with some colleagues to share our experiences with data mesh and how to frame the benefits for an executive audience, written up in an article titled The Business Case for Data Mesh.

  • Data mesh at Data Engineering Melbourne Meetup

    Data mesh at Data Engineering Melbourne Meetup

    Here’s the recording of my presentation on data mesh at the Data Engineering Melbourne Meetup, on 26 August 2021. We covered architecture, building blocks and more. Lots of great questions and discussion. Thanks as always to organisers Harmeet Sokhi, Timothy Findlay, and Andrew Jones!

  • Guiding the Evolution of Data Mesh with Fitness Functions

    Guiding the Evolution of Data Mesh with Fitness Functions

    I presented this webinar with Zhamak Dehghani – see the recording Guiding the Evolution of Data Mesh with Fitness Functions. There was great engagement with the topic and we captured some questions and further thoughts on this mini-blog post, published a little later. This presentation brought together the idea of architectural fitness functions from the…

  • Data Mesh – Decentralised Governance

    Data Mesh – Decentralised Governance

    I provided some commentary on data mesh for ITWire in this article titled Data mesh decentralises custodianship while maintaining governance.

  • Scaling Change

    Scaling Change

    Once upon a time, scaling production may have been enough to be competitive. Now, the most competitive organisations scale change to continually improve customer experience. How can we use what we’ve learned scaling production to scale change? I recently presented a talk titled “Scaling Change”. In the talk I explore the connections between scaling production, sustaining…

  • Scaling Change Spoiler

    Scaling Change Spoiler

    When software engineers think about scaling, they think in terms of the order of complexity, or “Big-O“, of a process or system. Whereas production is O(N) and can be scaled by shifting variable costs to fixed, I contend that change is O(N2) due to the interaction of each new change with all previous changes. We could…

  • The life-changing magic of tidying your work

    The life-changing magic of tidying your work

    Surprise! Managing work in a large organisation is a lot like keeping your belongings in check at home. Get it wrong at home and you have mess and clutter. Get it wrong in the organisation and you have excessive work in progress (WIP), retarding responsiveness, pulverising productivity, and eroding engagement. Reading Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing…