Category: Organisational Design
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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…
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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.
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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!
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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…
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Data Mesh – Decentralised Governance
I provided some commentary on data mesh for ITWire in this article titled Data mesh decentralises custodianship while maintaining governance.
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Concrete Culture Change
Culture is often difficult to define, and culture change even more so – what concrete actions do we need to take to change a culture? Despite this apparent difficulty, it is possible to spend an hour or two with a group, and leave with consensus on practical actions for culture change. This exercise achieves that…
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Health Hack Perth 2015
HealthHack is a three-day event bringing medical researchers and health practitioners together with software creators to prototype a new generation of health products. Business News Western Australia covered the Perth 2015 event in: HealthHack – ailments, remedies in equal doses. I helped organise this event with assistance from sponsors ThoughtWorks and Curtin University (among numerous other generous…