Who it's for
Businesses with one to five people who touch data, and no room for a dedicated data function
50 to 1,000 people. Power BI or similar on application databases, maybe some object storage and a couple of ETL jobs. Weighing Fabric against AWS, or about to have that decision made for you. You know you need this, and the enterprise platforms are built and priced for organisations with a governance team you do not have. That is the business this was built for.
In practice one person plays three of the roles below at once. That is fine; the product is built for it. What follows is what each role gets, so you can see who else needs to be in the room.
Data owner
Data steward
Report owner
Retention decisions
One person may hold three of these. The only thing the product will not accept is a blank.
The person who will carry it
Head of IT, head of data, BI lead, or "the analyst"
You are the data team. You know the problems on the problems page by heart because you are the one who absorbs them. You have been asked to propose a platform, or to stop the platform you have from drifting, and you have roughly half a day a week to give it.
What you want: to stop being the single point of failure, without having to invent an operating model from a blank page.
What you get
- A register, tier criteria, a responsibility matrix and seven procedures already drafted. You approve and adjust; you do not author.
- A dashboard that tells you what is set up, what needs attention, and where to click to fix it
- Workflows that push the decision to the owner, so chasing is the product's job rather than yours
- A capability map for Fabric and AWS to take into the platform conversation
- A REST API and MCP server, so your own tooling and AI assistants can read and propose changes through the same rules
Time asked of you: two days a week for six weeks, then half a day.
The person who signs
Finance director, COO, CTO, managing director
You do not log in weekly. You want to know whether the numbers you present are ones you can stand behind, what happens if the analyst leaves, and whether a platform spend of six figures is being made in the right order. You will be asked to approve an invoice somewhere between £8,000 and £30,000 a year, and to spend an hour a month on it at first.
What you want: a number you can follow, a risk you can name, and no new bureaucracy.
What you get
- One maturity score, zero to one hundred, and a one-page executive summary that prints for the board pack
- Three plain-English talking points generated from current state, not a slide someone wrote for you
- A succession answer: what the analyst knows, written down and owned by the business
- A platform decision you can make with the business rules already agreed, whichever way it goes
- A price below the threshold that usually needs board approval
Time asked of you: an hour a month at first, then an hour a quarter. Your attention is what makes it stick.
The people who own the data
Heads of finance, operations, commercial, quality, HR
You know what the data is for. You know which depot figures are estimates, what counts as an active contract, and which inspection records must be kept for seven years. You are not technical, you are not going to raise a ticket, and you have never heard of a "data steward". You have been told you are one.
What you want: to be asked the question once, in plain English, and to answer it in a minute.
What you get
- An email when you are appointed, saying what the role is and what it asks of you, before you have to go looking
- Every decision takeable in a browser: accept ownership, set retention, approve an access request, sign off a procedure
- A short role guide and a learning path, so nobody has to explain the vocabulary to you twice
- Your department's datasets in one view, so you can see what you are accountable for
Time asked of you: ninety minutes up front, then about an hour a month.
The person who asks for evidence
Compliance, internal audit, the customer's due-diligence team, the lender
You show up quarterly, or when something has gone wrong, or when a deal depends on it. You do not want a tour; you want to know who approved what, when, and to take a copy away with you.
What you get
- An append-only audit trail: every change writes a new event, attributed to a person, and nothing is overwritten
- Filters by entity, action, person and date, and a CSV export
- Procedures with an approver, a date and a version history
- On Enterprise: control mapping against a framework catalogue, quarterly evidence snapshots with tamper-evident digests, and an audit-readiness breakdown
The obvious follow-up is whether a database administrator could still alter the trail. They could; that is true of every audit log you already rely on, including your ERP's. What we do about it is restrict direct database access and sign the exports.
The people who deliver it for others
Data consultancies and Fabric or AWS implementation partners
You are good at the build. Your customers keep asking for the operating model as well, and every engagement re-invents it from a blank Word document. You want something repeatable to leave behind that the customer keeps using after you have gone.
What you get
- A pre-populated instance per customer, stood up in minutes, with the content already drafted
- The engagement ends with a configured, populated system rather than a PDF
- A licence and delivery model designed for partners
Being straight with you
Who it is not for, yet
A handful of reports and one analyst
A spreadsheet is honestly still enough. Come back when the count is in the dozens, or when that analyst hands in their notice.
A data team and a governance lead already in place
You have the operating model; you need a catalogue at scale. We would be a thin layer over work you have already done.
Hundreds of sources and thousands of users
That is the enterprise tier of this market, and the tools there cost what they cost for a reason. We are not one of them.
And one condition that applies to everyone: somebody above the person carrying this has to think it is a real problem. We cannot create that for you.
The first step costs you nothing
Forty-five minutes with whoever runs your reporting
We tell you honestly whether this is worth doing at all, and roughly what it would take. If the answer is not yet, you will hear that. "Not for us" is a fine outcome, and a better one than a slow maybe.