Foundry Program overview

The Foundry Program team

A Foundry Program team is a centralized set of business and technical stakeholders within an organization that is accountable for the Foundry program’s success. Think of the Foundry Program team as a startup within your organization; a central hub empowered to drive decision-making and execution in the interest of continued growth for your organization’s Foundry platform. Establishing a Foundry Program team delivers the following benefits:

• Enable structured, scalable, and maximized growth through parallel use case implementations.
• Centralize responsibility for the success of Foundry as a tool for your organization.
• Allow for cross-project decision making while still promoting self-service data and federated project implementations.
• Provide key contacts, clear owners, and a mechanism for delivering cohesive narratives to leadership and the rest of the organization.
• Create a vehicle for implementing innovative ideas on the path to holistic digital transformation.

For an organization to transition to full autonomy on the Foundry platform, teams should take ownership of the following areas of Foundry administration and development activities:

Data management

• Permissions management and access request flow
• Data ingestion
• Pipeline monitoring and management
• Data health management

Ontology and technology management

• Ontology change management
• Compute management
• Project resource allocation management
• Code optimization
• System architecture
• Third-party integration management

Program management

• Use case intake
• Scoping and prioritization
• User cultivation and training

Use case development

• End-to-end implementation of scoped use cases, including data and model integration
• Ontology development
• Application design and release

Foundry Program governance

Program governance establishes structures and processes that help drive development efforts, define strategic goals, monitor progress and success, and maintain communication lines across business domains as well as internally to the Foundry Program team. Governance defines how your Program team will work together and with stakeholders business domains to achieve your organization’s goals.

Establish governance and processes

• Identify your organization’s executive and senior stakeholders, and make sure their needs and goals in terms of program success and their own involvement in it are met. What do they want to know? What do they need to know? When/how frequently do they need to know it?
• For each process item, establish clear owners and decision makers. This will avoid distribution of responsibility, which can create confusion that slows down organization activity. Busy owners can delegate and develop teams under them if needed as programs grow, but processes without clear ownership will rarely succeed at scale.
• Establish relationships and feedback loops with Domain Leads and users across relevant business areas. The Program team should be focused on scoping out what users and organizations need built and how to solve their toughest problems. Additionally, you need to understand how to communicate what is being delivered and how they will communicate with you when they need changes or develop new requirements.