Maintenance
Part of Business intelligence explained for 2027
Business intelligence framework: what to know and why
Business intelligence framework in three publication tiers: what each promises, how a number gets promoted or demoted, and who decides which applies.
Most arguments about data inside a company are really arguments about status. Is this number official? Am I allowed to use it in a board deck? Can I build my own version? Who has to be consulted before it changes?
A framework that answers those questions is worth more than one that describes components. This page sets out a three tier model of publication: what each tier promises, how something moves up, and how something gets pushed back down.
What to take away
- Sort every artifact into three tiers by the promise attached to it, not by who built it or which tool it lives in.
- Promotion has to cost something. A tier that anything can enter promises nothing.
- Demotion is the part everyone skips, and it is what keeps the top tier small enough to defend.
The three tiers
| Tier | The promise | Who may create | Fair use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Governed | Definition is written, owned, tested, and change controlled | The data function, on request | External reporting, targets, compensation, anything with consequences |
| Curated | Built on governed concepts, reviewed, no individual guarantee of stability | Analysts and trained builders | Team operations, recurring decisions, internal discussion |
| Sandbox | No promise at all | Anyone with access | Exploration, one off questions, drafting a proposal |
The tiers are not a quality ranking of the people who build in them. A sandbox analysis by a skilled analyst can be better work than a governed metric. The tier describes what the organization is willing to stand behind, which is a different property.
Why three and not two
Two tiers, official and everything else, is the arrangement most companies drift into, and it fails in a specific way. The official tier is slow to enter, so real work happens outside it, and everything outside it is undifferentiated. A number from a careful analyst and a number somebody made up in a spreadsheet look identical to a reader.
The middle tier exists to make that distinction visible. Curated means: built on defined concepts, by someone who knows the model, and reviewed by a second person, but not promised to be stable or supported forever. That is an honest description of most useful analytical work, and it gives readers a category they can calibrate against.
What each tier actually requires
Governed. A written definition, a named owner, tests on the underlying table, a change process that announces before it lands, and a stated position on whether history gets restated when the definition changes. If any of those is missing, it is not governed, whatever it is labeled.
Curated. Reads its core concepts from governed definitions rather than recomputing them. Reviewed by one other person who knows the data. Carries the name of a builder and a date. Can break without an incident being declared.
Sandbox. One rule only: it must be visibly marked as sandbox wherever it appears. The entire value of the tier is that it is fast, so do not add process to it. Add labeling.
Promotion: the gate that keeps the top tier honest
Something moves from sandbox to curated when it is going to be used more than once, and from curated to governed when a decision with real consequences will rest on it.
The promotion request should be short and should answer four things: which recurring decision this serves, who will own it, what it excludes, and what would have to break for someone to notice. If the requester cannot answer the fourth, the artifact is not ready, because nobody has thought about how it fails.
Promotion has to have a cost, and the cost is the owner's time in perpetuity. A governed metric is a standing commitment to maintain a definition, answer questions about it, and manage its changes. Charging that cost honestly is what stops the governed tier from swelling until it means nothing.
Demotion: the part nobody builds
Artifacts should move down as well as up, and there should be named triggers.
- The owner leaves and nobody accepts the ownership. Demote it, do not reassign it silently.
- The definition has not been reviewed within its stated interval.
- The underlying tests have been failing and nobody acted.
- The decision it served has stopped being made.
- Usage has fallen to a single person, which usually means it is now a personal report rather than a shared standard.
Demotion is not deletion. Moving a governed metric to curated tells readers it is still there and no longer guaranteed, which is far more useful than leaving a stale promise in place.
Who decides
Keep this small. One person from the data function and one from the business area, meeting briefly on a regular cadence, can run promotion and demotion for a company of considerable size. A large committee turns the framework into the approval process it was designed to avoid.
Publish two lists: what is governed, with owners, and what was demoted recently, with the reason. The second list does more for credibility than the first, because it proves the tiers mean something.
Making the tier visible to readers
A framework nobody can see does not change behavior. The tier has to appear where the number appears: on the page, in the export, in the file name. Treat it as metadata that travels with the figure rather than as a policy people are supposed to remember. A reader deciding whether to put a figure in a customer facing document needs to know its status without asking anyone.
Two practical rules. Sandbox artifacts should be visually distinct enough that nobody screenshots one into a deck by accident, and distinct by more than color alone, since color is not a reliable sole signal for every reader. And any export from a curated or sandbox artifact should carry its tier in the file, because the export is where context is normally lost.
Starting from where you are
- List everything currently treated as official. It will be longer than expected.
- For each, check whether it has a written definition and a living owner. Most will fail one of the two.
- Move the failures to curated and say so publicly. Nothing breaks, and the top tier becomes credible.
- Pick the three that genuinely need to be governed and do the work properly on those.
- Label sandbox output from now on, and stop worrying about the rest.
Related reading on this site
The function that runs this, and the request economics behind it, are covered in business intelligence. Definition ownership and change control are the subject of data governance. Several tier problems show up first as the shapes described in recurring patterns in intelligence work. For how this sits alongside the build order of a project, see the six layer model, and for the tooling implications, see analytics tools.
Common questions
Is this the same as a data catalog?
No. A catalog describes what exists. This assigns a promise to each thing and a process for changing it. A catalog with no tiers lists a governed metric and somebody's draft next to each other.
What if a business team refuses to use the tiers?
They will use them the first time a sandbox number is challenged in a meeting and the label protects the person who produced it. Lead with that benefit rather than with compliance.
How many governed metrics should there be?
Few enough that the owners can be named from memory. If the list needs a search box, the tier has stopped meaning anything.
Does the middle tier not just become a dumping ground?
Only without the demotion triggers. Review the curated list on a fixed cadence and remove anything with no reader, and it stays a working shelf rather than an archive.
