The Data Product Is an Experience
An socio-biological reinterpretation of the living business entity
If you’ve been keeping up with buzz in the data management bubble, no doubt you’ve heard the term data product communicated by vendors and/or practitioners alike. Interpretations may be currently fuzzy in the wild, but for the purposes of this thought experiment, let’s start with a baseline definition as described by the data mesh principle titled data as a product1, which defines the term data product therein as the architectural quantum that enables domains to autonomously serve or consume (analytical) data.
Simply put, making data available for use consists of more than just the data. The process of making it readily usable requires context to describe the data (metadata), logic that acquires data from its operational source and/or used to provide access and/or other desired behavior to the data (code), and of course the infrastructure to bring it all to life. Remove any one of these and you have an incomplete experience.
Experience? Why would I refer to a data product as an experience? Data products are well… products, and presumably economic drivers are at play between data product producers and consumers right? The value exchange is clear isn’t it? What is exchanging hands here? This is where it starts to gets fuzzy for me…
While I am all in on the benefit of pushing ownership of analytic data out to the domain owners and am especially keen on stepping up the abstraction to a higher level to create a new building block (i.e. architectural quantum) for data analytics vis-a-vis the data product, I have difficulty with the mock transactional motivation that underlies the exchange between data product producers and consumers.
Do the operations within a business have to mimic its outward facing purpose in order to be in furtherance with the stated business objectives? Could there be a more fundamental purpose to every business in which we can draw inspiration? Perhaps from the natural world? I tend to think that the most successful systems humans have created are inspired from nature. With this frame of mind, it occurs to me that the common motivational thread of all living entities is being. The drive to exist, perpetuate, and thrive is strong. How we achieve that varies from one species to the next. Nevertheless, this raises the question, does a business exist as a living entity? I say yes and I believe that has already been decided.
The business entity is indeed a human creation. However, humans have a good track record of conjuring up shared myths2 into existence to reify their imaginations into a shared reality. One such notable shared myth is the corporation. In the eyes of the law, it exists just the same as every living, breathing person does in this world. We, as people, have come to accept this among many shared myths we hold as true. Given that, one can reason that the data product, as it were, serves a very specific purpose that uniquely contributes to a business entities’ existence much the same as the socio-biological facilities of humans; from lungs to language.
Our compulsion to create endless abstractions to address the complexity of our creations has a single destination. It is us. In this context, if the business entity is evolving to a future metahuman state, then surely the interpretation and recording of external and internal interactions over time from operational systems and the context around them most closely resembles our senses perceiving the world around us into a single (hopefully) coherent interpretation of the world (i.e. worldview).
This I submit to you is experience, and the collective acquisition and interpretation of these experiences is a short path to knowledge. What does all this framing imply for the future of data mesh and the data product? I imagine it could be a potential evolutionary path to the living business entity of the future.