Planning your deployment of Foundry
or: the art of drawing the rest of the — owl
Whether you’re just getting started or you’re a few use cases in and want to take Foundry to the next level, I have often been asked what the best practices for deploying Foundry are. I can’t deny that my answer has sometimes been functionally equivalent to the meme about how to draw an owl.
I could tell you that it should be well-proportioned and detailed, with clean lines and so on, but advice at that level of abstraction doesn’t get you any closer to a finished result. The point of this post is that a definitive plan does not exist. I’d be selling snake oil if I told you there’s one way to do it.
As with drawing, memory and imagination can only get you so far. It’s well known that even fairly minor projects have a way of going over schedule, budget, and underwhelming once delivered. My argument is that this happens because too much time is spent planning and anticipating instead of doing and dealing.
You just need to draw the damned owl.
If a successful Foundry deployment is your owl, the people, processes and technology of the organisation is your pen and paper. In practice, you will always end up working piecemeal, guided by operational users at their desk, to map these elements to your intended outcomes.
Each piece—staff, ways of working, data and existing software suite—is specific to your organisation. And nothing will be more unique than your goals. These allow us to draw the circles to give the owl its outline and proportions. But for what comes after, my advice is simply to get to it.
There are three broad principles to guide the strokes:
Work in short, iterative steps. In my experience, organisations willing to take a bottom-up, iterative approach to deployment get further faster. They don’t expect to get everything right from the beginning, but they also never assume that their central teams—or expensive consultants—will have all the answers.
Cast a wide net. Successful Foundry deployments involve a much wider set of client-side employees than you’d typically see in an enterprise IT project. In my experience, Foundry enables a very wide range of personas to contribute actively, and they can be productively included early in the project.
Make close allies. Far beyond the elusive knowledge-worker, almost everyone in the organisation uses data in some capacity. The real milestones are the points where lasting contributions are being made and shared by users who never thought they’d be able to use a tool like Foundry, let alone help deploy it. They will be your most eager advocates.
The art of deploying Foundry isn’t about perfect planning, but making continuous progress. You can’t let the fear of making a mistake get in the way of what is ultimately a creative process, with constant adjustments and refinements along the way. You simply need to put pen to paper—and trust that with the right people, tools and visions, your owl will come to life.
Martin Seebach is an independent data architect and consultant with a long history working for Palantir. Details on his practice and how to get in touch at seebach.tech.
Co-author Erik Winther Paisley is a researcher and anthropologist of technology. Details on his research offering at ewpaisley.com.
Foundry® is a trademark of Palantir Technologies Inc.