Physician, heal thyself!

Narrator: Consider this. If the originators, acolytes and sycophants of data mesh hadn’t been so free and easy with how they created and perpetrated technical debt, especially data model and data quality-related technical debt, then we wouldn’t need data mesh to try and get us out of the mess these sloppy developer people put us into in the first place.

Dud: Pete, what did the Data Mesh acolytes do before they got into data meshing?

Pete: An excellent question, Dud. From my perspective, what many data mesh folk were doing before data meshing involved creating shoddy and questionable agile applications and databases that made data warehousing even more necessary in the first place. However, being the coding cowboys they clearly are, they bypassed data warehousing because they didn’t understand it and came up with the data mash thing. A hacker’s workaround, which is sold as a solid paradigm.

Dud: So, you get the same guys in, the ones who badly engineered your business applications, to fix, in a consistently permissive way, the downstream supply of data to analytics and other applications.

Pete: That’s it in a nutshell, Dud. Think of it this way. You have a political party in government for eight years or two mandates. In that time, they have screwed up almost everything they possibly could have screwed up. You know. The economy, employment, inflation, healthcare, and infrastructure. You name it; they screwed it. What should you do during the next general election?

Dud: I’d vote them out of power.

Pete: Exactly Dud. But how does this work with the data mesh guys? I’ll tell you, Dud.

Dud: The floor is all yours, Pete.

Pete: Imagine you have contracted a company to renovate your house and build a substantial extension to your property.

Dud: Okay.

Pete: They come in, make a lot of noise, use your kitchen, eat your food, drag dirt and dust all through your house and after eight years, have very little to show in terms of meeting their contractual obligations and your requirements.

Dud: Blimey!

Pete: What would you do, Dud?

Dud: I’d be very annoyed, Pete. I would give them a very stern look!

Pete: Now imagine that they were politicians, Dud. Would you vote them out of power at the next general elections? Or would you vote the scoundrels back in on the basis that their new policies, all requiring additional funding, would give you hope that they would fix everything they broke and build everything that they should have built but didn’t?

Dud: So, if Data Mesh was a political party, we wouldn’t vote for them, and if they were builders, we wouldn’t contract them?

Pete: Nothing gets past you, Dud.