This article is a continuation on the organisation track. Please se previous articles: 1. Roles in a data team and 2. Surrounding roles
- Roles in a data team
- Surrounding roles – Roles directly interacting with the data team
- Platform and facilitating roles – Roles making sure that the data teams have the right foundation to stand on.
- Data Transformation roles – Roles that make sure that the transformation is ongoing
- Data Governance and Data Management roles.
Today we are discussing the Platform and facilitating roles. The sole purpose of these roles is to make sure that the Data Teams and the roles in the teams have an efficient and smooth workday so they can focus on delivering the right business development.
To become concrete, what do we need these roles to do in order to support the data teams?
- Good data platform with good environments
- Secure platforms with the right security and monitoring capabilities
- Easy to work environments and pipelines for CI/CD, DevOps, MLOps, etc
- Reusable frameworks for building data pipelines, analysis, ML models, etc
- Community facilitation so that roles between teams and domains can collaborate effectively.
All of these things take time, effort and skill to create, maintain and evolve. In smaller organisations it is easy to include them directly into the data teams but when you want to scale it out it is often beneficial to make them more explicit.
- Platform engineer – The platform engineers creates the data platforms and tooling needed for business development. This includes making sure that development, test, prod environments are easy to work in, that the CI/CD etc works well and that the environments are secure and have the right monitoring capabilities. This is technically a complex roles that requires a lot of skills and expertise as well as a service-oriented mindset.
- Framework engineer – The framework engineer creates reusable frameworks for different parts of the data lifecycle. Common examples are ingestion framework, data monitoring framework, data transformation framework, Feature creation framework, etc. The framework engineer preferably has a background in data engineering or similar and an interest in both good developer practices and simplifying the operations of a data engineer.
- Community Leader – The Community leader has the purpose of facilitating communities for similar roles in different domains to work together, share ideas, set standards and together decide when to do a larger transformation. Common examples of communities are Data Engineers, Data Analysts, Data Scientists, etc. These communities seldom happen by themselves. They need to be created and nurtured in order to be useful and this is where the community leader comes in, it is that persons responsibility to drive and facilitate the community so that the collaboration has a platform with shared workspaces, forums and meetups to stand on.
Each of these roles can be integrated into the teams, in some cases the work is implicit in other roles such as data engineers. Making the roles more explicit not only creates a better focus for some employees, it also creates time for the work to happen.
The purpose of these roles is to speed up the work for everyone else, if used properly it can have a significant ROI multiplied by many times the effort spent.