Engineering a Data Mesh Platform for an Ecosystem Across Organisations

Join us in a discussion with:
Tom De Wolf | Senior Architect and Innovation Lead, ACA Group

Speaker bio:
Tom De Wolf is an experienced hands-on architect and serves as the innovation lead, spearheading new innovative initiatives for future ACA Group projects and offerings. His expertise lies in cloud native platform engineering and 'Data Mesh' platform architectures, leveraging his background in software engineering and experience in designing various architectures, including software, microservices, data platforms, and IoT solutions. Tom draws inspiration from his knowledge of evolutionary architectures, domain-driven design, team topologies, platform thinking, platform engineering, and cloud-native technologies, among others. In addition, Tom is the founder and host of the Data Mesh Belgium meetups. His academic background as a Ph.D. holder in Computer Science has taken him around the globe, where he has presented at numerous international conferences.

Description:
ACA Group has implemented Data Mesh Platform within the Flemish Cultural Sector in collaboration with the Flemish Department of Culture, Youth and Media (CJM) and publiq. Instead of supporting a single organization, the challenge here was to support a whole eco-system of teams across many organisations within the cultural sector. In this talk we will explain why a Data Mesh solution was fit-for-purpose for enabling a data-driven digital transformation in the sector. As an example, we will dive into some meshes of data products and data use cases. On the technical side, a cloud-native platform engineering architecture was envisioned, designed, implemented and evangelised. After the talk, the audience will have insight into this real-world data mesh case and the architecture behind it. This Data Mesh Platform received the Flanders Digital Award 2023 for Best Digital Transformation Project.