The dashboard nobody on your team built is now yours to support.
Business-built BI is fast because it's close to the business. Then the person who built it moves on — and central IT inherits an asset it didn't write, can't read, and owns the SLA for indefinitely. Stratum turns that inheritance into something you can scope.
Built close to the business
An embedded analyst or power user builds for speed and domain knowledge. It works, and the business comes to depend on it.
The builder moves on
Promotion, a new role, or attrition. The context of how and why it was built walks out the door with them.
It lands on central IT
You hold the pager for a model you've never seen. The first ticket on it is a small crisis. Support is forever.
This isn't a failure. It's the lifecycle — and it's near-universal.
The instinct is to frame it as IT versus the business. It isn't. Nobody did anything wrong: BI gets built where the domain knowledge is, and support naturally consolidates where the platform lives. The handoff is structural — which is exactly why it recurs, and why it's worth a repeatable answer instead of a heroic scramble each time.
You didn't build it
No design intent, no documentation, no one to ask. The knowledge left with the builder.
You can't easily read it
Opaque DAX, undocumented measures, hidden dependencies. Understanding it is the job before fixing it.
You own it anyway
The SLA is yours the moment it's adopted — whether or not anyone scoped what "supporting it" actually means.
An intake gate: the acceptance criteria for adopting business-built BI.
Instead of supporting whatever shows up, an asset passes a documentation and quality bar before it enters your support queue. That single move converts an open-ended liability into a known, scoped surface.
"We support whatever shows up"
- Assets enter support in unknown condition
- Fragility and dependencies discovered mid-incident
- No record of what you inherited, or in what state
- Support scope is unbounded and unbudgeted
An open-ended liability.
"We support what passed intake"
- Every adopted asset is assessed and documented first
- Fragility, dependencies, and gaps surfaced up front
- A recorded baseline of exactly what was inherited
- Support scope is known before you own the SLA
A scoped, known surface.
Three deliverables that turn an inheritance into an owned asset.
Not a cleanup pass. Comprehension first — understand and safely adopt what the business handed you, then keep it under control.
Inheritance assessment
A plain-English map of every adopted model: what it does, how fragile it is, what depends on what, and where the undocumented landmines are.
Support baseline
A documented state-at-handoff, with evidence — so IT is never blamed for pre-existing debt. "We inherited this in this condition," on the record.
Ongoing enablement
A living map that lets whoever picks up a ticket understand a model they didn't build — plus drift detection that flags when an ownerless model quietly changes.
Support is a cost centre. So the case rests on a metric.
The real competitor here isn't another tool — it's inertia, the "we'll just muddle through" that's cheaper than any purchase until the day it isn't. The way to beat it is to make the cost of muddling through visible.
When a ticket lands on a model nobody on the team built, the clock that matters isn't time-to-fix — it's time-to-understand what the model even does before anyone can touch it safely.
Stratum is built to compress that: comprehension arrives with the asset instead of being reconstructed under incident pressure. The support baseline makes the reduction measurable, engagement over engagement — so the intake gate is justified by a number, not a narrative.
Handoff is a project-management problem. A project delivers analytics, the team disbands, and the asset moves to operational support.
PMaaS governs the project. Stratum governs the asset the project leaves behind.
Stop inheriting liabilities. Start adopting scoped assets.
Run one inherited model through an intake assessment and see the map, the baseline, and the support surface you'd actually be signing up for.