Warehouse, platform, lake—these words easily take a project to “move every table in first.” After the move, the catalog looks like a museum: subjects complete, plaques long, visitors unsure which exhibit they should decide in front of today. A decision entry is the opposite: the lobby holds only the few tiles this week must call. The warehouse behind can be deep. Leadership must not get lost in the catalog.
Two hundred tables, forty subjects, anyone can request access. Acceptance is “all connected.” No KPI owner, no drill path, no meeting that must use it. The next chart still needs a new extract. Ask “why did margin drop” and the answer is “you can analyze it yourself on the wide table.”
Three to five operations KPIs in the lobby. Each chart writes definition, cutoff, and owning role; clicks to documents; pushes a person over threshold. A subject warehouse can exist, but it only serves these entries and named phase-two questions. Acceptance is the weekly meeting turning off parallel sheets, and exceptions sitting overnight less often.
Mid-size companies that start with a large platform slide into the exhibit most easily. Layer on demand; see Do mid-size companies have to buy a data platform. When more systems connect, standardize APIs instead of stacking the catalog; see More systems connecting: standardize APIs or draw charts first. Shipping reports versus walking a problem chain becomes “the catalog is complete” versus “the problem can close”; see Reporting vs analysis: which one is a data capability. Before opening self-serve analysis, lock the signed KPI formulas. Otherwise the exhibit, in the name of “everyone is an analyst,” forks into dozens of margins again.
The exhibit is not entirely useless. Audit, trace, and later specials need replayable detail. That is the storeroom, not the lobby. Decorating the storeroom as a reception hall brings the pretty-wall disease with it; see A pretty wall screen is almost as bad as none. Name subjects by business question, not source-system name. A catalog called ERP_SALE_DTL_V3 is a place decision-makers will not walk into. What the operations lobby should put first: Which KPIs belong on the leadership dashboard first. Alerts are the entry’s night shift; see Alerts pushed to people, so exceptions rarely sit overnight.
The catalog can be deep. The lobby must be narrow
DaXi has “queryable tables” and “must-open entries” signed as two lists. The first can grow. The second freezes in phase one, so the project does not congratulate itself on subject count. Put last month’s entry opens and problems closed into the data-team standup. Do not make catalog growth a KPI. That rewards moving the warehouse. To pull an existing catalog from exhibit to entry, tell the Data service page how many charts actually enter the weekly meeting. After APIs are reused, the next entry is faster; see Once APIs are standardized, the next chart is faster.
Exhibit thinking has a quieter consequence: access requests become “open every subject.” A narrow lobby is what lets permissions cut by role. When the entry is clear, audit knows who is watching operations numbers and who is only browsing the catalog.
Lock signed KPI formulas before you open self-serve
Before opening self-serve analysis, lock the signed KPI formulas. Otherwise the exhibit, in the name of “everyone is an analyst,” forks into dozens of margins again.
Name subjects by business question, not source-system name. A catalog called ERP_SALE_DTL_V3 is exhibit thinking. Decision-makers will not walk in.
Put last month’s entry opens and problems closed into the data-team standup. Do not make catalog growth a KPI. That rewards moving the warehouse. After the phase-one lobby freezes, a new subject must carry “which entry it serves, which class of problem it closes” before it can be a project.