Most businesses that bring in a BI consultant aren't in crisis. The company is doing well, the data is there, reports exist. Things are broadly working - just not as well as they should be. Numbers take too long to find. Meetings run on gut feel because nobody quite trusts the dashboard. Someone always has a slightly different version of last month's revenue figure.
It's not chaos. It's friction. And friction, over time, costs more than most leadership teams realise.
After the first three months inside a new client engagement, certain patterns emerge. Not every business has every problem, but the overlap is striking. These are the things that come up again and again, regardless of industry, size, or how sophisticated the team considers itself to be.
Nobody agrees on the numbers, and nobody's said it out loud
This is the most common finding, and usually the most uncomfortable one to raise.
Ask the sales director what revenue was last quarter. Then ask the finance director. Then look at the dashboard. There's a reasonable chance you'll get three different answers, and a near certainty that at least two of those people know it, have privately questioned it, and haven't brought it up because it feels like too large a problem to open.
The cause is almost always innocent. Metrics get defined slightly differently across systems, departments use different date cut-offs, someone built a calculation into a spreadsheet three years ago that nobody else knows about. No sabotage, no negligence, just accumulated drift.
The fix isn't complicated, but it requires someone to sit in a room with all parties and agree on definitions before anything else gets built. That conversation alone tends to be revelatory.
The most important reports are the least trusted
There's a particular kind of dashboard that gets built with enormous care, launched with a proper presentation to senior leadership, and then quietly abandoned within two months. Not deleted, just no longer opened.
When you ask why, the answer is usually vague. "It doesn't quite show what we need." "The numbers seemed off that one time." "We find it easier to just pull the data ourselves."
What happened, almost always, is that someone spotted an error early on, a figure that didn't match expectations, a total that seemed wrong - and rather than raising it and getting it fixed, they simply stopped trusting the whole thing. That distrust spread quietly through the team. The dashboard still exists. The data behind it is probably fine. But the trust never recovered.
Rebuilding that trust is partly technical and partly human. The numbers need to be right, yes, but people also need to see that someone is actively maintaining the thing, that errors get caught and corrected, that the report is alive rather than abandoned.
Spreadsheets are doing work they were never meant to do
Every business has them. The master spreadsheet that one person owns, that feeds three reports, that would cause a minor emergency if it were lost or if that person left. It exists because at some point, a system didn't do quite what was needed, someone capable built something in Excel to fill the gap, and it worked well enough that it became permanent.
These spreadsheets aren't a sign of failure. They're a sign of a resourceful team. But they carry risk - they're fragile, they don't scale, and the logic inside them is often undocumented and understood by one person alone.
Mapping these out early in an engagement, understanding what they do and why they exist, is essential. Sometimes they need replacing. Sometimes they just need documenting properly and connecting to a more robust process. Either way, they need finding first.
The BI environment was built by someone who no longer works there
This one is more common than it probably should be. A capable developer, internal or contracted, built out a reporting environment, did good work, and then moved on. What they left behind functions, mostly. But nobody fully understands it.
New reports get added around the edges. Nobody wants to touch the core model because it's not clear what will break. Technical debt accumulates quietly. The business keeps growing, the data keeps getting more complex, and the foundations get shakier without anyone quite acknowledging it.
The answer isn't always to rebuild from scratch, that's expensive and disruptive, and usually unnecessary. But it does require someone to go in, map what exists, document what isn't documented, and make a clear-eyed assessment of what's solid and what isn't. After that, decisions can be made properly rather than avoided indefinitely.
Senior people are making decisions without data, and everyone knows it
The final pattern is perhaps the most telling. In meeting after meeting, decisions get made on experience, instinct, and whoever presents their case most confidently. The data exists to inform these decisions. It's just not accessible in the moment, in the right format, with the right context.
This isn't because leadership doesn't value data. Most do. It's because the gap between the data and the decision is too wide. The report requires too much interpretation. The metric doesn't quite map to the question being asked. There's no narrative explaining what the numbers mean for the business right now, this week, this quarter.
Closing that gap, between data and decision, is ultimately what good BI work is about. Not building impressive dashboards. Not implementing the latest technology. Making it easier for the right people to know what they need to know, when they need to know it, without having to work for it.
Three months inside a business tends to surface all of this and more. The good news is that none of it is unusual, and none of it is unfixable. Most of it doesn't even require significant investment, it requires clarity, honest conversation, and someone who knows what to look for.
That's usually where the real work begins.