3 ms·

You're right to group Data teams together. They seem to share a common plight. In my experience, internal employees outside Data have a funny relationship with

You're right to group Data teams together. They seem to share a common plight. In my experience, internal employees outside Data have a funny relationship with Data. They hate to manage it but they love to blame it, especially in analytical / decision-making scenarios. Teams that "own" the data usually get the blame, on top of having to deal with a mass of rotting pipes and noncompliant teams, while also losing out on credit when non-Data teams report big wins. Based on what the GP says, it sounds like Palantir knows how to exploit common internal politics around Data. They build up technical & social expertise in ETL'ing disparate data sources, and they can avoid blame by being hired by executives as an external third party.

vundercind 2y ago
This is exactly what I thought TFA was getting at when it brought up politics being a problem at companies and in sectors Palantir engages with, but instead it went a much more general direction.
- hitekker 2y ago
  He talks about it a little: > Why is data integration so hard? The data is often in different formats that aren’t easily analyzed by computers – PDFs, notebooks, Excel files (my god, so many Excel files) and so on. But often what really gets in the way is organizational politics: a team, or group, controls a key data source, the reason for their existence is that they are the gatekeepers to that data source, and they typically justify their existence in a corporation by being the gatekeepers of that data source (and, often, providing analyses of that data). [3] This politics can be a formidable obstacle to overcome, and in some cases led to hilarious outcomes – you’d have a company buying an 8-12 week pilot, and we’d spend all 8-12 weeks just getting data access, and the final week scrambling to have something to demo. I think he's seen more companies without talented Data experts than companies with that talent.
  - MichaelZuo 2y ago
    This makes it sound like their actual product is to be a bureaucratic/departmental door rammer? Because the ostensible product, at least in the ‘pilot’, produced in just a single week, seems like it is pretty much guaranteed to be bad.

vundercind 2y ago

This is exactly what I thought TFA was getting at when it brought up politics being a problem at companies and in sectors Palantir engages with, but instead it went a much more general direction.

hitekker 2y ago
He talks about it a little: > Why is data integration so hard? The data is often in different formats that aren’t easily analyzed by computers – PDFs, notebooks, Excel files (my god, so many Excel files) and so on. But often what really gets in the way is organizational politics: a team, or group, controls a key data source, the reason for their existence is that they are the gatekeepers to that data source, and they typically justify their existence in a corporation by being the gatekeepers of that data source (and, often, providing analyses of that data). [3] This politics can be a formidable obstacle to overcome, and in some cases led to hilarious outcomes – you’d have a company buying an 8-12 week pilot, and we’d spend all 8-12 weeks just getting data access, and the final week scrambling to have something to demo. I think he's seen more companies without talented Data experts than companies with that talent.
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  This makes it sound like their actual product is to be a bureaucratic/departmental door rammer? Because the ostensible product, at least in the ‘pilot’, produced in just a single week, seems like it is pretty much guaranteed to be bad.