Editors Note: How and why Palantir Foundry is used differs across every organization — but the need for positive disruption is a common theme across all our implementations. In this blog post, former CTO for the Prime Minister’s Office in the Government of Israel and Palantir Forward Deployed Engineer Eran Witkon explains how Foundry compliments existing IT infrastructure, while still creating positive disruption across an organization:
I am often asked what is unique about Foundry? In this blog post, I talk about the positive disruption Foundry creates in organizations and how that can be beneficial for them.
IT systems mirror the organization structure
For most of my career — prior to joining Palantir in 2016 — I held various CTO roles in both commercial and government organizations, where I was ultimately responsible for sourcing and implementing the right technology so that those organizations could achieve their strategic goals.
I often reflected during those years that an organization’s IT architecture system often mirrors the organization’s structure. Looking around your own organization, how many departments co-own the same IT system? At an organizational level, it can be incredibly challenging to source a system that is consistently owned by both IT and the business.
Most enterprises I have observed define the tools they use into one of two general buckets: enterprise systems or end-user applications. The former are typically owned by IT and the latter mostly used by business end-users:
The main rationale behind this division is that organizations have clear owners and SLAs on each side of the playing field. However, in many cases its downfall can manifest with larger IT projects which don’t have direct business value, leaving business stakeholders often feeling like they don’t have the tools and data to make informed decisions. Enter Palantir Foundry.
Breaking down the wall…
Palantir Foundry breaks down that wall. Co-owned by both IT and the Business users, Foundry is helping IT teams with their data integration efforts while providing business units the tools and applications they require to confidently iterate with their data.
Foundry’s built-in security and governance primitives — including granular access controls, purpose limitations, sophisticated audit capabilities, and retention and deletion management — allow organizations to ensure compliance with the world’s most stringent data protection regimes. Protected by these boundaries, business users can interact with the data and build end-user applications autonomously.
Understanding the Ontology
One of the so-called ‘secret sauces’ of Foundry is what is widely known in computer science as the Ontology. Unlike other tabular solutions, an Ontology allows the organization to build a digital twin of the business which not only represents the business entities — but more importantly the relationships between them — and any business logic required to edit them.
The codified links represented in the ontology allow business users to explore the data and navigate through entities without any technical knowledge or learning complex programming languages.
This model enables the Ontology to become the foundation on which end user applications are built by the business, while connecting back to any IT-owned transactional system for both read and writes.
Endless opportunities
I would be hard-pressed to find an organization that says they don’t have all the data they need to make decisions. Companies are often bursting at the seams with dashboards and reporting and analytical tools, but in reality we see endless real-world examples of where the right person did not have the right tooling, or access to the right data to perform in their role.
In a real-world example, an aviation engineer — had a theory on the root cause of a repeated problem — yet was unable to prove it based on the PDF-based sensor data reports they were receiving. Once given access to interact with the data directly — he was confidently able to prove his theory.
Foundry has been positively disrupting critical industries since its inception, and ontological modelling has been at the heart of this.
In October 2022, Tyson Foods’ CTO and CDO Scott Spradley spoke at Palantir’s FoundryCon about the opportunity that comes from ontological modeling.
“When you start thinking about the power of ontological modeling, our mindset was when you start to couple that together with the semantic layer Palantir has, you’ve got a huge win opportunity. Massive.
“…when you can start to make sense out of vast amounts of data that seemingly are just totally disconnected, and you can find relevance between those, you’re in a very different spot.”
Foundry as your business gateway
“Is it a duck?” a fellow architect from another organization challenged me when we were discussing how Foundry acts both as an analytical platform but also interacts with the transactional back-end systems. I understood the genesis for his question. It’s a somewhat outdated view that analytical systems and transactional systems typically operate separately.
Foundry breaks down that dated assumption.
Foundry’s Ontology is the source for any analytical application but — when fully utilized — it also writes back to the source systems. Take, for example, a supply chain ontology: the ontology is enriched with an ML model to compute the risk and recommendation for each order and ERP writeback actions that allow canceling or reprioritizing orders.
A supply chain control tower application can now be built utilizing the ontology, presenting users with prioritized orders that are at risk, with recommended model-driven actions and the ability to writeback to the ERP system.
In short, the ontology is a two-way street: IT can feed it with the data from the transactional systems and also configure writeback actions which updates the source systems. End-user applications are fed from the ontology in user-friendly way and, when needed, trigger these writeback-actions.
Author
Eran Witkon is a Palantir Product Manager and Forward Deployed Engineer. Prior to joining Palantir in 2016, he was acting IT CTO for the Prime Minister’s Office in the Government of Israel, where he led transformation processes such as web-scale IT and Enterprise Data hub, using both commercial and open source software. He previously led implementation of digital transformation processes at CAL, an Israeli credit card business Eran holds a B.A in Computer Science from TAU, and an MBA.
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