Retire before you migrate.
The cheapest dashboard to migrate is the one nobody opens. How to use evidence to shrink an estate before it moves.
Every BI estate collects clutter. A dashboard built for a project that finished. A copy made “just to try something”. A report the one person who used it left behind two reorganizations ago. On a single platform, this clutter mostly costs attention. In a migration (say, Tableau to Power BI or Domo to Power BI) it costs real money, because every object moved is an object someone has to translate, test and support.
Start with evidence
Rationalization goes wrong when it’s based on opinion. Everyone thinks their dashboards are essential. The answer is to put evidence in front of the people who decide:
- When was it last opened, and by how many people?
- Who owns it? Is that person still here?
- What depends on it? Does anything else read this dataset?
- Is there a near-identical version? Which one do people actually use?
A read-only scan of platform metadata and usage answers most of these questions without anyone opening a dashboard.
Four kinds of clutter
- Dormant content: not opened in a long time.
- Duplicates: copies that have drifted apart in small, unexplained ways.
- Conflicting metrics: several definitions of the same business term, giving different answers.
- Orphaned data: datasets and pipelines that no longer feed anything anyone looks at.
Retire, consolidate, migrate
Each candidate gets one of three outcomes:
- Retire: no longer needed. It stays in the open specifications, so nothing is truly lost and it can be brought back.
- Consolidate: merge duplicates and agree on one definition for each metric.
- Migrate: used and needed, so it goes into the migration backlog.
Because retired items remain as specifications, owners are more willing to let things go. The decision can be reversed without an archaeology project.
Why it matters
A smaller estate is quicker to migrate, cheaper to run and easier to secure. It also gives people fewer conflicting answers, which is often the benefit they notice most.
Rationalization is part of every estate assessment and full migration, and it’s worth doing even if you’re staying put. More on rationalization.
If you are pricing a migration, a dashboard count is the wrong basis for the estimate.
If a Domo renewal is coming up, price the exit before you sign.
And whatever is left to move, move it once: nobody should migrate twice.
Show us your estate.
A read-only metadata export is enough to start. No platform access required, mutual NDA as standard.