460 dashboards to 72, licence spend cut 38%.
A Lloyd's-market specialty insurer had a BI estate spread across three platforms and 460 dashboards — most of them unused or duplicated. A six-month rationalisation programme rebuilt the top 72 on a governed semantic layer.
Noise out, signal in.
Usage telemetry revealed that 83% of dashboards had fewer than 3 users per month. Six metrics had different definitions in different dashboards. Analysts were re-pulling the same data weekly. We fixed both — by retirement and by semantic-layer discipline.
Approach.
Usage audit
Telemetry across Power BI, Tableau, Qlik. Evidence-based retirement list.
Semantic layer
dbt-based metric layer with owned, version-controlled definitions.
Top-72 rebuild
Audience-first dashboards with usage tracking from day one.
Self-service enablement
Curated datasets, office hours, guild.
Retirement
Communicated retirement of the other 388 dashboards, with owner sign-off.