The CIO's data checklist
You own the estate that every number comes out of, and you are asked to modernise it without stopping the business or losing the reporting. This is what to ask for, and in what order.
01 The numbers you own
Five you should be able to defend
Not the longest list — the shortest one that covers the job. Each links to its full definition, including where the number lives and how it gets read wrong.
Time to insight
The business-facing measure of whether the estate serves anyone.
elapsed time from a business question being asked to a trusted answerCapex%Capex intensity
What the estate consumes, against what it returns.
capital_expenditure ÷ net_revenueCTSCost to serve
The run cost per user, per channel, per service.
(delivery + service + returns + order_handling) ÷ customers or ordersMTTRMean time to repair
How long a failure lasts, which is what users actually experience.
total_downtime_hours ÷ number_of_failuresLCLineage coverage
What makes a migration survivable: knowing what feeds what.
critical_data_elements_with_end_to_end_lineage ÷ total_critical_data_elements02 Questions to ask
Six questions for your next review
Ask them of your own team before anyone asks them of you. The uncomfortable answers are the useful ones.
- If we moved the core system next year, could we list every report that would break?
- What proportion of integration work is rebuilt each time a source system changes?
- How much of the estate exists only because two systems could not agree on a customer?
- Where is the reconciliation effort concentrated, and what is it costing in people?
- Can we prove data residency and access control per domain, or only per system?
- What would it take to add a new source and have it governed on the same day?
03 First 90 days
A plan that finishes something
Narrow and finished beats broad and half-built. Each stage produces evidence that funds the next one.
04 Where the data lives
The systems behind your numbers
| System | What it holds | Key records |
|---|---|---|
| Core transactional estate | ERP, core banking or the equivalent: the systems of record everything else derives from. | Master data, Transaction, Posting |
| Integration and middleware | The point-to-point layer that grew organically and now costs most of the change budget. | Interface, Job, Mapping, Schedule |
| Data platform | Where sources are connected, entities resolved and definitions governed once. | Source, Pipeline, Golden record, Metric |
| Identity, access and policy | Who may see what, enforced at the data rather than in each application. | Role, Policy, Entitlement, Audit event |
05 Questions
Frequently asked
Does this mean replacing our warehouse?
No, and any vendor who says otherwise is selling a migration rather than solving the problem. The hub connects sources and governs meaning; the warehouse keeps storing and computing.
How does this change a core system migration?
It makes the blast radius knowable. Lineage across the reporting chain turns "which reports break when we move" from a discovery exercise during the cutover into a list you have before you start.
What is the honest cost argument?
Not licence savings. It is the integration work that is not rebuilt every time a source changes, and the reconciliation effort that stops being a permanent team.
Bring your hardest number
We will trace one of your own figures back to source, live, on your data.