The Head of Data's Cloud Stack

What a Head of Data owns operationally — the data foundations, the governance plane, platform operations, and the self-service muscle that lets business teams consume governed data without queue-based gatekeeping.

BusinessCapabilityTechnology
Compass
  • Businesspersona, use case, outcome
  • Capabilitywhat the org needs to do
  • Technologythe technology choices
Guided journey · Step 1 of 4

Data Foundations

Build the data foundations — storage substrate, format, ingestion patterns. Without this, governance overlays sprawl.

~ 10 weeks

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Narrative intro

Where the CDO sets the agenda, the Head of Data runs the platform. This map is the operational view — foundations, governance, platform operations, semantic discipline — and the SKUs that anchor each. The Power BI Pro and Fabric pairing is the most-used self-service surface; Purview Data Governance is the cross-platform catalogue.

Key takeaways

  • Foundations first, governance second — the reverse leaves sprawl behind
  • Platform operations is a day-job: SLOs, on-call, change management
  • Semantic model discipline prevents sixteen versions of revenue
  • Purview is the federation layer across Fabric, Databricks, Snowflake

Programme shape

Estimated duration
20–40 weeks
Estimated FTE
1 FTE platform lead + part-time governance and BI SMEs
Spend tier
significant
Risk level
moderate

Sits between the CDO's strategic agenda and the engineering platform. Quality of the federation catalogue determines whether self-service scales or strangles.

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