Phase 1: Roles and responsibilities

The following roles and responsibilities are suggestions based on experience working to develop Program teams for use cases and organizations of all sizes and scopes. These suggestions are meant to outline the organizational needs often faced when establishing and scaling a Foundry Program; depending on your needs and use cases, this does not necessarily mean your organization must fill each role at all times.

Head of Program

Responsibilities

The primary owner and driver of the Foundry Program's success, setting and communicating the vision for the Foundry Program across the organization.

Work closely with senior stakeholders and relevant executives to maintain a feedback loop between the Foundry Program and the rest of leadership. This includes reporting on program status, ingesting organization-wide strategy, and collaborating to find new opportunities for digital transformation through Foundry across organizations.
Collaborate with Platform and Data Governance teams on use case governance by developing and enforcing processes to ensure use cases comply with governance requirements, from inception and scoping through launch and maintenance.
Set the high-level direction of the program's process and scaling requirements by working with the Program Manager to use this vision to guide processes, governance, and best practices across teams and in cross-functional collaboration efforts.
Collaborate with domain leads to evaluate, prioritize, and approve or reject new use case requests, based on the overall vision of the program and the organization's strategy at that time.

Profile and required skills

Typically reports directly to senior / executive sponsors
Proven leadership and management skills
Deep understanding of organization-wide vision and strategy
Background in strategy and effective development of software platform
Excellent communicator and motivator

Relevant Foundry applications and resources

Program Manager

Responsibilities

Standardize and enforce Foundry development best practices across use cases, working closely with Data Governance and Platform teams and use case leadership to create practices that make sense for the organization's SOPs and team structures.
Partner with the Head of Program to own cross-functional communication and evangelization of the Foundry Program across other organization verticals and program area owners. This level of communication is generally one step down from senior leadership and executives.
Collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders on change, risk, and resource management frameworks. In Phase 1, these may be high-level and largely driven by external stakeholders with experience in those business areas (risk teams, staffing teams, information officers), but the Program Manager is responsible for creating and socializing these basic artifacts for the program. As the program grows, ownership for these artifacts can be passed to appropriate owners, such as the Head of Platform or the Head of Data Governance.
Create frameworks to assess performance within and across use cases and teams. This includes setting and managing OKRs and KPIs, and creating aggregate reporting to document progress and areas of opportunity across different parts of the program.
Own end-to-end use case scoping and development to drive increased value and overall digital transformation.
Collaborate closely with engineers and application developers, delivering and iterating on requirements through writing of tasks, drawing diagrams, workflows and wireframes, testing new features and workflows, and liaising with stakeholders throughout the development process.
Work with Domain Leads to ensure the alignment of both technical and operational goals; collaborate on goals and desired outcomes for the use case, and reach an agreed set of metrics and reporting to monitor progress and success.

Profile and required skills

Experience managing cross-functional programs
Experience managing technical and organizational projects and reporting to senior/executive stakeholders
Strong written and verbal communication skills
Familiarity with the structure of the organization and how to navigate it
Excellent leadership and organizational skills

Relevant Foundry applications and resources

Head of Data Governance

Responsibilities

Work with Compliance, Legal, and Data Protection (or similar teams) to ensure laws and requirements are reflected in the way data is processed within Foundry, including the approach to processing sensitive data
Focus on making data usable, in compliance with internal and external data quality standards and SLAs.
Own the documentation and maintenance of data governance requirements, and communicate these across workstreams.
Build monitoring and metrics around data governance processes, and own the continuous reporting and adjustment of these systems.
Partner with Permissions Managers and the Data Lead to implement groups and roles in project permissions. Create documentation and repeatable workflows across common project types along with workflows to enable self-service on data governance requirements as applied to each project type.
Implement data governance review processes across all workstreams within the Foundry Program. Work with team leads to understand their workstream needs and processes, and implement data governance checks, requirements, and processes to ensure data governance standards are being met across the Program.
If needed, interface with Palantir teams for support services delivery; leverage Palantir resources, including documentation, advisory teams, and support services, to implement a data governance program in alignment with your organization's needs and with adequate vendor support systems in place.

Within Phase 1, the Head of Data Governance role can often be assumed by the Data Lead or the Ontology Lead. However, we recommend assigning this as a standalone role with dedicated resourcing by Phase 3 at the latest due to the scale of data management and complexity of workflows and use cases.

Profile and required Skills

Knowledge of data governance best practices and standards
Familiarity with organization-wide data access permissions, regulations, and authentication systems (Okta or Active Directory, for example)
Experience in leading technical teams
Programming skills (SQL, Python, PySpark/Spark)
Knowledge of data quality and version control best practices
Familiarity with agents / VMs
Strong technical communicator
Knowledge of systems architecture

Relevant Foundry applications and resources

Data Lead

Responsibilities

Own data connections between Foundry and source systems, ensuring that all connections are clean, reliable, and compliant.
Create and maintain a prioritized backlog and roadmap of data ingestion initiatives across the Program. Work with Program leadership to ensure that the backlog and roadmap are in alignment with the broader Program goals, strategy, and implementation roadmap.
Manage data ingestion and pipeline health, including setting Program-wide standards for data ingestion and deciding and enforcing pipeline health metrics.
Monitor data quality and health, including metadata management. Design and implement monitoring systems across all pipelines, and own the reporting and remediation of those systems.
Focus on making data available to users, in compliance with internal and external data quality standards and SLAs; this involves close work with use case teams as well as with Compliance, Security, Permissions, and Data Governance teams, both within and external to the Foundry Program.
Work with the Data Protection Officer and Compliance (or similar teams) to ensure the laws and requirements are reflected in the way data is processed and consumed within Foundry, including the approach to processing sensitive data.
Collaborate with use case teams to identify opportunities for new data acquisition, and design how those pipelines will be implemented and integrated into the existing architecture and structures.
Establish and enforce best practices around data pipeline building and data integration design. Create a set of guidelines and best practices that can be communicated to and used by implementation teams at scale.
Partner with Permissions Managers in pipeline design to implement groups and roles in project permissions, both in the design of new projects and in the ongoing growth and maintenance of existing projects.

Profile and required skills

Data Engineer skills (SQL, Python, PySpark/Spark)
Knowledge of data cleaning and quality best practices
Knowledge of version control best practices
Familiarity with agents / VMs / connecting systems
Capability to communicate between technical and non-technical stakeholders
Experience in leading technical teams

Relevant Foundry applications and resources

Ontology Lead

Responsibilities

Manage Ontology development and permissions, including the definition of Ontology standards; create data models in the Ontology that reflect organizational priorities and structures and deeply connect with the reality of operations and requirements
Develop and maintain an Ontology roadmap in conjunction with the Foundry Program roadmap; own the long-term vision for the evolution of the Ontology as a foundational structure supporting all use cases and Program initiatives
Own Ontology maintenance and develop a deep understanding of relevant data sources, including ensuring pipelines meet standards for ingestion and transformation into the Ontology, understanding how pipelines can be enriched so they don't grow stale and out of date, and updating the Ontology in accordance with new use cases, pipelines and data sources, or user-led requests
Work closely with the Data Governance Administrator and Data Lead to ensure feasibility and security of Ontology development initiatives. This involves collaboration on design and architecture of data ingestion and management as a hydration source to the Ontology, and making sure that the loop is closed between what your organization needs, how that can and should be represented in the Ontology, and how the two are connected by compliant and functional pipelines.
Work with Domain Leads and use case teams to map concepts to the Ontology; get deeply involved in the scoping and development of use cases to ensure that all Ontology-relevant concepts and ideas included in the scope of a use case can be implemented in alignment with the ontological structure

Profile and required skills

Data pipeline development and management skills
Strong organization and documentation skills
Expertise in databases
Capability to communicate between technical and non-technical stakeholders
Experience leading technical teams