Sterling is a data consultancy that ended up writing software. Every engagement starts by establishing what you actually have — systems, owners, gaps — and ends with data the business trusts enough to act on.
You can't govern what you haven't mapped, and you can't fix what nobody owns.
Almost every stalled data program we've been called into shares the same conditions. None of them are technical. All of them are settled in the first month — or never.
We use one scale and we're blunt about where you land on it. The assessment establishes the starting point. Everything after that is moving right, one domain at a time.
We don't grade a whole organisation with a single number. Maturity is scored per domain — customer, product, asset, finance — because they are almost never at the same stage, and the sequence you fix them in matters more than the score.
We'd rather sell you a three-week assessment and be right about the next six months than sell you six months and be wrong.
Two to three weeks to establish ground truth: every system that holds material data, who owns it, where the quality actually sits, and which gaps are costing you now versus which ones can wait. You leave with a map, a ranked gap list and a costed six-month plan — whether or not you run it with us.
What's in the assessmentOne trusted record per customer, product, supplier or asset — matched, merged and survivorship-ruled, with the lineage to explain why any given value won.
Master dataOwnership, policy, classification and controls, designed thin enough that people follow them and measured so you can tell whether they are.
GovernanceGetting data between systems without silently losing or duplicating it. Pipelines, connectors, reconciliation and the alerting that tells you when a feed breaks.
IntegrationThe part most consultancies skip. We keep running the stewardship, the exception queues and the quality reporting after go-live, for as long as you need us to.
Managed dataAssessments kept collapsing into spreadsheets. A system inventory in one tab, owners in another, gaps in a third — accurate on the day it was handed over and stale within a quarter. The value walked out the door with the consultants.
So we built what we needed. TellParrot holds the system inventory, the ownership map and the maturity scoring in one place, and it stays live after we leave. It's how we run our own assessments.
It isn't a prerequisite. If you've already bought a governance platform, we'll work in yours.
Interviews, system walkthroughs and profiling against the real data — not a questionnaire. We come back with what we found, including the parts you won't enjoy.
Weeks 1–3There are always two or three fixes worth doing immediately. We do those while the plan is being agreed, so the program has something to show before it has a budget line.
First 30 daysSequenced by domain, with a defined deliverable each month and a checkpoint where you can change direction or stop without losing what's been built.
Months 1–6Your people run it, with the documentation, the runbooks and the training to do so. If you'd rather we kept running it, that's a Managed Data engagement — not a dependency we engineered.
OngoingWe have no licence revenue to protect, so the recommendation you get is the one we'd make if you were spending our money. We work across the platforms you've already bought.
Two to three weeks. You get a map of your systems, named owners, a ranked list of gaps, and a costed 6-month plan. No obligation to run it with us.
