Ownership stops evaporating
Every domain, system and policy carries a named owner and a review date. When someone moves on, the orphaned items surface on a report instead of quietly becoming nobody's problem.
What we build
The deliverable kept going stale. So we replaced it.
Consultancies produce documents. Documents are accurate on the day they're handed over and wrong within a quarter. That's the problem we set out to fix — and it turned out to need software, not a better template.
The problem with the artefact
A good assessment has a shelf life of about ninety days.
Here is what a conventional data assessment produces: a system inventory, an ownership matrix, a set of maturity scores, a gap register and a roadmap. Usually across a slide deck and three or four spreadsheets. It is genuinely useful — for a while.
Then a system gets decommissioned. A steward changes roles. Two teams merge. A new platform lands. Nobody updates the spreadsheet, because updating it isn't anyone's job and the person who built it has left the building. Within two quarters the organisation is back to not knowing what it has — and the next engagement starts by rebuilding the same inventory.
We did that rebuild enough times to stop blaming the client for it. The artefact was the problem. A document can't be kept current by an organisation that didn't have the discipline to keep the data current in the first place.
What we built instead
TellParrot is the platform we wrote to hold an assessment as live state rather than a snapshot. The inventory, the ownership map, the domain model, the maturity scoring and the gap register all live in one place, with a defined owner on each item and a visible last-reviewed date on everything.
The practical difference is that when a steward leaves, the gap is visible instead of silent. When a new system is added, it's added to the inventory rather than to a spreadsheet nobody opens. And when we come back in twelve months, we start from your current position rather than from discovery.
Where it fits — and where it doesn't
It's an assessment and governance-state platform. It is not an MDM engine, an ETL tool or a catalog crawler, and we won't pretend otherwise: on projects that need those, we implement the right platform for the job and use TellParrot for the layer above them.
It is also not a condition of working with us. If you own Purview, Collibra or Alation, that's where your assessment goes. What we won't do is deliver you a spreadsheet and call it governance.
Snapshot vs. live state
- System inventory
- Owned & dated
- Ownership map
- Named, not “the business”
- Domain model
- Customer, product, asset…
- Maturity scoring
- Per domain, re-scorable
- Gap register
- Ranked, tracked to closure
- Roadmap
- Linked to the gaps it closes
Your assessment content is exportable in an open format at any point, including after the engagement ends. Governance data you can't get out isn't governance.
Why it matters to you
Three things change when the assessment stays alive.
Progress is measurable
Re-scoring against the same scale in month six gives you a defensible before-and-after. “Customer went from Mapped to Owned” is a sentence a board can act on; “governance maturity improved” is not.
The next engagement starts ahead
Whether it's us, your internal team or another firm, work resumes from current state. Nobody pays twice for the same discovery.
Being straight about it
Yes, we have an interest here.
We built the software, so it's fair to ask whether our advice bends toward it. Three things keep that honest, and you can hold us to all of them.
The assessment is a fixed fee whether it's delivered in our platform or yours. Your content exports in an open format, at any time, including after we part ways. And we take no licence commission on any third-party platform we recommend — including the ones that compete with what we built.
If your governance platform is already in place and working, using it is the right answer, and that's the answer you'll get.
- Same price either wayFixed assessment fee, delivered in our platform or in yours.
- Open export, alwaysYour inventory, owners, scores and gaps leave in a format you can read without us.
- No licence commissionsWe take no margin or referral fee on any third-party platform, ever.
- Australian hostingWhere we host anything for you, it stays in Australian regions unless you direct otherwise in writing.
- It's optionalNothing in an engagement depends on you adopting software we own.
See it against your own systems.
The assessment is the fastest way to judge any of this. Two to three weeks, fixed fee, and the findings are yours regardless of what you do next.