Fix the foundation
Make the estate answer for itself
Grants that hold, lineage that survives a refactor, and an evaluation suite that says whether the thing got better. So the audit is a query.
You can see the data. You cannot explain it.
The platform works. The questions that stall a programme are the ones about it rather than in it.
Two dashboards disagree
Both are computed from real tables and neither is obviously wrong. Deciding which to believe takes a person a week and the answer does not stick.
The service principal sees everything
It was granted broadly during a deadline in 2023 and nobody has revisited it. What an application can reach is now wider than what any of its users can.
Nobody can score the agent
It answers. Whether it answers correctly, and whether last month's version was better, is a matter of opinion.
Governance gets retrofitted because it is invisible until the quarter it is not, and retrofitting it onto a live estate is most of what makes it expensive.
The shift
Three ways to end up defensible
Two of them produce a document rather than a property.
Write the policy down
True on paper
Audit it periodically
Accurate once a quarter
Make it a property of the platform
True continuously
What we put in place
The governance and the evaluation together, because a governed estate producing unscored answers is only half defensible.
Catalogue and schema design
Structured around the organisation rather than the storage layout, so a grant model can follow how teams actually work.
Grants through groups
Joining a team is what changes access. Individual grants are how an estate becomes unexplainable one exception at a time.
Hive metastore migration
In stages, with external tables where a full move costs more than it returns. Sequencing rather than whether.
Lineage that survives
Traceable through the transformations you actually run, so the question of where a number came from has an answer.
An evaluation suite
Ground truth you own, running on every change, so a regression is caught by a gate rather than by a user.
The written record
What was decided and why, which is the thing the next platform lead needs and almost never gets.
A query
Rather than a reconstruction
The bar is whether it holds when asked
Every engagement here ends with a query somebody can run in front of an auditor rather than a document somebody wrote about the estate. That is a harder thing to deliver and it is the only version worth paying for.
Clients we have done this for
Automotive / Fintech
SWBC
TechFabric rebuilt SWBC's LOSExpress platform for credit unions: the user experience, the design system, and the front-end architecture.
Automotive / Fintech
Location Services
Location Services moved off Synapse and SQL Server onto Databricks Lakehouse and Lakebase, converted with TechFabric Airlift and cut over in reversible waves. The rules engine that validates a repossession assignment on arrival now runs against governed lakehouse data.
FAQ
Explainable estate: common questions
We already have Unity Catalog. Is this still relevant?
Usually more so. Most rollouts stop halfway: the catalogues exist, half the estate is still external tables against the old metastore, and there is a service principal everybody has stopped asking about.
Can you do the governance without the evaluation?
Yes, and it is a common start. They are separated here because they answer different questions, and most estates need the first before the second is worth doing.
How do we know it stayed true?
Because the checks run rather than being scheduled. A grant model expressed through groups and an evaluation suite in the pipeline are both continuously true or continuously failing, which is the property a periodic audit cannot give you.
If your problem is shaped differently
Build an agentic software factory
Launch a product in a regulated vertical
Take the AI demo to production
Move off the warehouse without a Friday night
Modernise the estate that outgrew itself
Keep people in charge of the agents you already run
Leave your team able to do it without us
See what production is doing, and be allowed to act