01
Trust
Definitions, data quality, lineage, reconciliation, semantic consistency, and confidence in reported KPIs.
Platform Health Checks Service
Business Intelligence Health Check for Trusted, Efficient Reporting
Dataconsultant reviews the reliability, control, performance, usability, cost, and business value of your BI environment. The assessment supports leaders responsible for analytics, technology, finance, risk, and operations by identifying reporting weaknesses, platform risks, duplicated effort, and practical priorities for a more trusted and manageable decision-support capability.
- Evidence-led platform and report assessment
- Data quality, security, and governance review
- Prioritised findings with accountable actions
- Vendor-neutral recommendations and knowledge transfer
Illustrative assessment viewBI Environment Health Profile
Action planning73example health index
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81
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12example findings
4priority controls
9improvement actions
Illustrative structure only. Scores and counts do not represent client results.
Direct answer
What a business intelligence health check evaluates
A BI health check examines whether reporting is accurate, controlled, usable, secure, scalable, cost-conscious, and aligned with business decisions. It connects technical evidence with operating practices and stakeholder needs, then converts findings into a prioritised improvement plan.
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Performance
Refresh reliability, query behaviour, model design, capacity use, report responsiveness, and operational resilience.
03
Control
Ownership, access, sharing, change management, lifecycle controls, monitoring, support, and auditability.
04
Value
Adoption, decision usefulness, report duplication, cost, skills, service model, and alignment to business priorities.
Business need
Common BI problems and how the health check responds
Signals that the BI environment may be unhealthy
- Different dashboards report different answers for the same KPI.
- Reports are slow, fail to refresh, or depend on manual workarounds.
- Users export data to spreadsheets because dashboards do not meet their needs.
- Access permissions, sharing, or sensitive-data controls are unclear.
- Report volumes, licences, capacities, and cloud costs continue to grow without clear ownership.
- Self-service analytics has expanded without standards, support, or lifecycle management.
- Executives question report credibility or cannot trace numbers to accountable sources.
What the assessment provides
- A fact-based view of platform condition, decision risks, and operating weaknesses.
- Consistent scoring across business value, data, technology, governance, security, and adoption.
- A findings register with evidence, impact, risk, owner, and recommended treatment.
- Quick wins separated from structural remediation and longer-term investment choices.
- A practical roadmap that considers dependencies, capacity, budget, and change readiness.
- Clear limitations where evidence, access, sampling, or regulatory interpretation is incomplete.
Suitability
When this service is a good fit
Appropriate when you need
- An independent view before investing in a BI upgrade, migration, or managed service.
- A baseline after rapid growth, acquisition, decentralised analytics, or cloud adoption.
- Evidence for executive, audit, security, risk, finance, or procurement decisions.
- A way to rationalise reports, improve trust, and strengthen platform governance.
- Prioritised remediation rather than another broad technology strategy.
May require a different or additional service
- A formal financial, statutory, regulatory, or certification audit.
- Penetration testing, red-team testing, or specialist cybersecurity assurance.
- Legal advice on privacy, retention, residency, or sector obligations.
- Full implementation, migration, dashboard development, or platform operations.
- Guaranteed performance outcomes without access to systems, data, and accountable stakeholders.
Assessment scope
Capabilities covered by the BI health check
The final scope is tailored to platform architecture, business risk, organisation size, user population, reporting complexity, and the decisions the assessment must support.
Business alignment and reporting value
Review decision needs, KPI definitions, report ownership, stakeholder satisfaction, critical reporting processes, duplicated content, unmet demand, and whether analytics supports accountable action.
Data quality, lineage, and semantic models
Examine source-to-report traceability, transformation logic, model reuse, measures, dimensions, reconciliation, data-quality controls, refresh dependencies, and the treatment of master and reference data.
Architecture, performance, and reliability
Assess gateways, refresh patterns, capacities, workspaces, extracts, query behaviour, model design, deployment practices, monitoring, failure handling, environment separation, and resilience dependencies.
Security, privacy, governance, and auditability
Review roles, permissions, row-level security, sharing, exports, service accounts, sensitive-data exposure, logging, change approval, retention, ownership, policy alignment, and third-party access.
Adoption, support, skills, and cost management
Evaluate usage patterns, user experience, training, support demand, service levels, backlog management, centre-of-excellence practices, licensing, cloud consumption, vendor dependencies, and team capability.
Deliverables
Outputs designed for decision-making and remediation
| Deliverable | What it contains | How it supports decisions |
|---|---|---|
| Executive health summary | Overall condition, material risks, strengths, limitations, and priority decisions. | Gives sponsors a concise basis for investment, risk acceptance, or remediation. |
| Assessment scorecard | Consistent ratings across value, data, platform, security, governance, adoption, and cost. | Provides a repeatable baseline for comparison and future reassessment. |
| Findings register | Evidence, impact, risk level, affected assets, dependencies, owners, and recommendations. | Creates traceability from observation to accountable action. |
| Report and platform observations | Inventory patterns, duplication, critical-report concerns, model issues, and operational weaknesses. | Supports rationalisation, ownership, and technical remediation planning. |
| Prioritised improvement roadmap | Quick wins, foundational controls, technical changes, operating-model actions, and sequencing. | Balances impact, risk, effort, cost, and dependencies. |
| Management presentation | Key findings, decisions required, target condition, and next-step options. | Supports executive, audit, procurement, and steering-committee review. |
Delivery process
How Dataconsultant performs the health check
The process is evidence-conscious, collaborative, and scaled to the estate. Timelines are confirmed after scope, access, stakeholders, and sampling requirements are understood.
Align objectives and scope
Confirm business concerns, decisions required, platforms, critical reports, stakeholders, boundaries, and assessment criteria.
Primary output: agreed scope, evidence plan, and assessment framework.Collect evidence
Gather architecture, inventories, usage data, configurations, logs, policies, support information, costs, and stakeholder perspectives.
Primary output: evidence register and documented limitations.Assess the current state
Review selected reports, models, controls, processes, performance, support, adoption, ownership, and business alignment.
Primary output: scored observations and draft findings.Validate risks and causes
Test factual accuracy with owners, distinguish symptoms from root causes, and evaluate business, security, regulatory, and operational impact.
Primary output: validated findings and risk ratings.Prioritise improvements
Separate immediate controls, quick wins, structural remediation, platform decisions, and capability-building needs.
Primary output: sequenced roadmap with owners and dependencies.Present and transfer knowledge
Explain findings, decisions, trade-offs, assumptions, and measurement approach to sponsors and delivery teams.
Primary output: management readout and action mobilisation.Governance and assurance
Controls considered during the assessment
The health check links BI technology to the organisational controls needed for trustworthy and sustainable reporting.
AccountabilityReport owners, data owners, platform owners, decision rights, and escalation routes.
AccessIdentity, roles, row-level security, external sharing, exports, and privileged administration.
ChangeDevelopment standards, testing, deployment, release approval, versioning, and rollback.
QualityReconciliation, validation, issue management, refresh controls, and KPI definitions.
OperationsMonitoring, support, incident handling, service levels, capacity, continuity, and recovery.
PrivacyClassification, minimisation, retention, residency, purpose, and sensitive-data exposure.
Third partiesVendor access, gateways, connectors, embedded analytics, contracts, and service dependencies.
EvidenceLogs, inventories, approvals, ownership records, exceptions, and management reporting.
Applicable legal, regulatory, contractual, security, and sector requirements should be confirmed with authorised specialists.
Platforms and technologies
Technology coverage is adapted to your BI estate
Dataconsultant can assess single-platform and mixed-platform environments. Recommendations remain vendor-neutral unless product selection or procurement support is part of the engagement.
Engagement options
Choose an assessment model that matches the decision
| Model | Best suited to | Typical scope | Client participation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Focused health check | A specific platform, business unit, risk concern, or critical-report set. | Targeted evidence, selected interviews, defined samples, concise findings, and priority actions. | Platform owner, business owner, technical contacts, and evidence access. |
| Enterprise BI assessment | Multiple business units, platforms, jurisdictions, or major investment decisions. | Broader inventory, stakeholder coverage, governance, architecture, cost, risk, adoption, and roadmap. | Executive sponsor, data and technology teams, security, finance, risk, and business owners. |
| Pre-migration or pre-procurement review | Cloud migration, platform consolidation, replacement, contract renewal, or managed-service sourcing. | Current-state baseline, requirements, dependencies, risks, rationalisation, target controls, and decision criteria. | Programme, architecture, procurement, finance, security, and operations stakeholders. |
| Continuous assurance | Organisations needing recurring health monitoring and governance reporting. | Periodic checks, KPI monitoring, control review, issue tracking, trend reporting, and improvement governance. | Named service owner, data providers, platform team, and governance forum. |
Cost factors
What influences BI health-check pricing and timing
Estate scale
Number of platforms, tenants, workspaces, reports, models, data sources, users, regions, and business units.
Assessment depth
Executive review, technical configuration, code or model analysis, performance evidence, security review, and sample size.
Risk and regulation
Sensitive data, regulated reporting, residency, audit requirements, third parties, and legal or specialist review needs.
Evidence readiness
Availability and quality of inventories, logs, architecture, policies, ownership, cost records, and stakeholder access.
Deliverable detail
Scorecards, management reports, control mapping, roadmap detail, business cases, procurement support, and workshops.
Remediation support
Whether the engagement ends with recommendations or continues into design, implementation, validation, and managed support.
A written scope and estimate should follow initial discovery. Fixed claims about duration or cost are not reliable without understanding the estate and decision requirements.
Measurement
How improvement can be measured after the assessment
Trust and control indicators
- Percentage of critical KPIs with approved definitions and accountable owners.
- Data-quality incidents, reconciliation exceptions, and unresolved control findings.
- Coverage of access reviews, audit logging, change approval, and lifecycle controls.
- Critical-report lineage and documentation completeness.
Performance and reliability indicators
- Refresh success, incident frequency, recovery time, and report response performance.
- Capacity saturation, inefficient queries, model size, and failed-job trends.
- Production stability after releases and remediation.
Adoption and value indicators
- Active usage, repeat usage, decision-process coverage, and stakeholder satisfaction.
- Reduction in duplicated reports, spreadsheet workarounds, and manual reconciliations.
- Time to deliver trusted reporting and backlog ageing.
Cost and operating indicators
- Licence utilisation, capacity efficiency, cloud consumption, and support effort.
- Service-level performance, issue ownership, training coverage, and skills resilience.
- Roadmap completion and benefits supported by documented baselines.
Frequently asked questions
Business intelligence health check FAQs
What is a business intelligence health check?
It is a structured review of the BI environment, including data sources, semantic models, reports, dashboards, performance, security, governance, adoption, support, cost, and alignment with business decisions. The goal is to identify material risks and practical improvements rather than to produce a generic maturity score.
What is included in Dataconsultant’s BI health check?
Scope can include stakeholder interviews, platform inventory, report and dashboard review, lineage sampling, semantic-model assessment, performance analysis, access-control review, governance and support review, adoption analysis, cost review, risk rating, prioritised recommendations, and an executive findings report.
Which BI platforms can be assessed?
The service can cover Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, Qlik, Looker, SAP Analytics Cloud, Oracle Analytics, cloud-native services, and mixed estates. The assessment can also consider connected warehouses, lakehouses, integration tools, identity platforms, catalogues, and monitoring systems.
When should an organisation request a BI health check?
Common triggers include conflicting KPIs, slow reports, low adoption, uncontrolled self-service analytics, rising costs, security concerns, audit findings, platform migration, acquisition, executive dissatisfaction, duplicated reports, or uncertainty about readiness for AI-assisted analytics.
How long does a BI health check take?
Duration depends on platform count, report and model samples, data sources, user population, business units, jurisdictions, evidence quality, technical access, stakeholder availability, and deliverable depth. A schedule is confirmed after discovery rather than assumed.
How is pricing determined?
Pricing reflects scope, estate size, sample depth, stakeholder count, technical and security access, regulatory requirements, workshops, onsite needs, deliverables, and whether remediation planning or implementation support is included.
Does the service include remediation?
The core engagement identifies and prioritises findings. Remediation can be included or commissioned separately, covering dashboard rationalisation, model improvement, performance tuning, governance design, access remediation, monitoring, migration planning, and capability building.
How are security, privacy, and data residency considered?
The review can examine identity, roles, sharing, row-level security, exports, sensitive-data exposure, logs, development separation, retention, residency, and third-party dependencies. It does not replace legal advice, penetration testing, or formal certification.
What deliverables will we receive?
Typical outputs include an executive health summary, scorecard, findings register, risk and impact ratings, report and platform observations, quick wins, prioritised remediation roadmap, ownership recommendations, KPI framework, and management presentation.
Can Dataconsultant work with our internal BI team and vendors?
Yes. The review can be delivered with internal analytics teams, business owners, data owners, security, risk, finance, vendors, systems integrators, and managed-service providers. Responsibilities, access, evidence, and escalation paths are agreed at the start.
Will the assessment disrupt production reporting?
Most work uses interviews, documentation, metadata, configurations, logs, usage information, and agreed samples. Any activity that could affect production should be separately approved, controlled, and scheduled.
How are findings prioritised?
Prioritisation considers business impact, decision risk, regulatory exposure, security significance, user impact, technical effort, dependency, cost, and urgency. Evidence gaps and assumptions are documented so leadership can make informed choices.
Review the health of your BI environment
Share your platforms, reporting concerns, business priorities, known risks, and upcoming decisions. Dataconsultant can help define an appropriate assessment scope and evidence plan.