Data Tips #23 - Organisation: Platform and facilitating roles

This article continues the organisation track. Previous articles covered roles in a data team and the surrounding roles.

Today we discuss the platform and facilitating roles. Their sole purpose is to make sure that the data teams, and the roles within them, have an efficient and smooth workday so they can focus on delivering business development.

To become concrete, what do we need these roles to do in order to support the data teams?

• A good data platform with good environments.
• Secure platforms with the right security and monitoring capabilities.
• Easy-to-work-with environments and pipelines for CI/CD, DevOps and MLOps.
• Reusable frameworks for building data pipelines, analysis and ML models.
• Community facilitation so that roles across teams and domains can collaborate effectively.

All of this takes time and deliberate ownership. When it is nobody's job, each data team solves it locally, five times, slightly differently - and the cost shows up later as fragmentation rather than as a missing role.

A useful test

Ask your data teams what fraction of their week goes into work a platform role could have solved once. If the answer is large, you do not have a productivity problem in the teams. You have a missing foundation.