AI & Data
Data governance and BI: reliable KPIs for the leadership team
Good-looking dashboards do not fix numbers that do not match. How to structure data, metrics and owners so BI becomes a decision tool.
In 30 seconds
- 01The problem with most BI is not the dashboard, it is the data that reaches it.
- 02Few metrics, each with a written definition, a single source and an owner.
- 03Integrate the sources before designing screens. The visuals come last, not first.
Every leadership team has lived this scene: two departments arrive at the meeting with different numbers for the same metric. The debate stops being about the decision and becomes about which spreadsheet is right. Switching BI tools does not fix this. Governance does.
Why the numbers do not match
In most mid-sized companies, the same data lives in several places: the ERP, the CRM, tracking spreadsheets and manual exports. Each department calculates the metric its own way, with its own date ranges and exceptions.
A metric without a written definition is an opinion with decimal places.
The three pillars
Start small
The most common mistake is trying to model all of the company’s data at once. The project gets long, expensive and loses its sponsor before delivering value. It works better to pick one theme, such as sales or finance, with five to ten metrics leadership actually follows, and make that theme reliable end to end.
In practice · the metric test
- Is there a written definition every department accepts?
- Does the number come straight from the systems, with no spreadsheet in between?
- Is there one person responsible for it?
A metric that fails any of the three should not be on the leadership dashboard.
The dashboard is the last step
With definitions, a single source and owners in place, the Power BI dashboard, or any other tool, becomes simple, fast and, above all, trustworthy. It also opens the next step: bringing the metric into the systems where decisions happen, instead of leaving it on a separate screen.