Zhamak Dehghani

Zhamak Dehghani works with ThoughtWorks as the director of emerging technologies in North America, with a focus on distributed systems and big data architecture, with a deep passion for decentralized technology solutions: data mesh, decentralized trust and identity, and networking protocols. She founded the concept of Data Mesh in 2018, a paradigm shift in big data management toward data decentralization, and since has been evangelizing the concept with the wider industry. She is a member of ThoughtWorks Technology Advisory Board and contributes to the creation of ThoughtWorks Technology Radar. Zhamak has worked as a technologist for over 20 years and has contributed to multiple patents in distributed computing communications, as well as embedded device technologies.

2021 Talk: Introduction to Data Mesh: A paradigm shift in managing analytical data

For over half a century organizations have assumed that data is an asset to collect more of, and data must be centralized to be useful. These assumptions have led to centralized and monolithic architectures such as data warehousing and data lake, and neither of which have been able to enable data-driven innovations at scale.
In this talk, Zhamak will unpack the challenges of existing paradigms of big data management.
She introduces Data Mesh as an alternative approach to analytical data management.
An approach that shifts the data culture, technology and architecture
– from collecting data to connecting data
– from data as an asset to data as a product
– from proprietary big platforms to protocols, and
– from top-down manual data governance to a federated computation one.
She will explore the relationship between a Data Mesh implementation and emergence of a knowledge graph, and will leave you with a call to action to continue the exploration.