Why I like working with Foundry
Branching out after a decade at Palantir
I spent eleven years working at Palantir Technologies. Looking back, one of the most rewarding aspects was the opportunity to go behind the scenes at companies in such a wide range of industries.
Through these projects, I got to meet a whole host of people with genuine passion for the work they did—often in organisations that themselves work behind the scenes to keep the world running smoothly in ways that are easy to take for granted as an outsider.
As a data architect, your work brings you right to the core of the organisation. My backstage passes taught me a lot about how the many ways large organisations navigate complexity, but also showed me how they can struggle with the tools at their disposal.
The usual Foundry client isn’t starting from scratch and they aren’t lacking in ambition. They know that data integration is essential, and they’ve put time and resources into exploring the options on the market. By the time we got involved, they had often built out an elaborate internal structure of tools and modules that never quite delivered for the business.
And there’s no lack of products on the market. In any typical large organisation you might find a set up consisting of interlocking data lakes, warehouses, dashboarding and reporting software, specialist point solutions and many more, augmented by a ‘last mile’ thicket of spreadsheets and powerpoints.
These tools each have their strengths, but they also have an inherent affinity to one part or function of the business. A tool that's powerful in the hands of IT will often feel overwhelming or inaccessible for a business user, while a 'user-friendly' business tool can be limiting for a software engineer. There’s inevitably a high degree of friction, bottlenecks and incompatibilities.
Organisations can and do make it work, even to great effect, but the process of joining up a multiplicity of tools is in every case a massive commitment on the part of the IT organisation. They find themselves tied to an open-ended software development project that’s always playing catch-up with user requests. It isn’t a satisfying way to work, no matter how passionate you are.
What struck me about Foundry was how it managed to change that dynamic. It’s a testament to Foundry’s technical capabilities that you’re able to bring IT pros, business analysts, and generalists onto a common platform that caters to such different expectations and skill sets.
It’s always been one of the most rewarding aspects of working with Foundry—seeing an IT project succeed by letting end-users play to their strengths. Shifting the variety of tools onto the platform also had the effect of giving colleagues a common language, and freed up their hands to be far more self-reliant—and bold—than they’d been in the past.
To answer my own question, that’s why I like working with Foundry. And why I’ve set up my own consulting practice in the field.
This is exactly what my practice will focus on: leveraging the unique capabilities of Foundry to fulfil the promise of technology by taking a hard turn away from sprawling, ever-larger IT-centred projects, and putting initiative back into the hands of the grassroots, the countless professionals in every industry with all impossibly and wonderfully varied needs and abilities.
I’ll be sharing a series of posts over the next weeks to explore how I have come to understand this can be achieved, and other topics that have come up in conversations and on projects over the years. I hope you’ll subscribe and read along.
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.