Hire vs. buy the analyticsyour executives keep asking for.
A working guide for IT leaders at multi-site senior living operators. Work through it and you'll leave with the hiring commitment priced honestly, three questions to put to your team before the req goes up, and a checklist you can take into any vendor conversation, including ours.
Where you are, in three numbers.
Want the full picture before you decide? See the operator track page →
Price the commitmentbefore you post the req.
Hiring is sometimes the right call. It's rarely the cheap one, and the parts that make it expensive aren't on the salary line. Price the whole thing before the req goes up.
A minimum viable data function is a data engineer for pipelines out of your vendor systems, plus an analyst for definitions and answers. One of them has to be senior enough to architect it, or you're hiring a lead too. Here's what you're actually committing to.
data function
not a project
And the consultant shortcut decays. An engagement can build you dashboards. Then the engagement ends. Definitions drift, a vendor changes an export format, a pipeline breaks quietly, and within a year you're back in Excel with a nicer-looking artifact of what used to work. A data capability isn't a project. It's a program, and programs need owners.
None of this means hiring is wrong. It means hiring is a multi-year commitment you should make on purpose, not a default you back into because the asks kept coming.
Before that req goes up, there are three answers worth having. Ask your team these →
Ask your teamthree questions first.
The salary line is the easy part of this decision. These three questions surface whether the plan behind the req survives contact with year two, which is where hiring plans usually come apart.
You're not looking for enthusiasm. You're looking for a named owner and a mechanism.
"Who owns the definition of occupancy on day one, and who owns it the day that person leaves?"
A named owner, one definition per metric, written down somewhere that isn't a person's head, and applied wherever the question gets asked so the CFO, the regional and the board deck can't disagree.
"The analyst will handle it." Your occupancy number feeds financing covenants, state reporting and PBJ. If the definition lives with one person, it walks out with them, and every number after that is a guess with a chart on it.
"What happens to the pipelines in month 19?"
A plan for the second hire, a peer group so the first one isn't alone, or a named maintenance owner who isn't the person who built it.
Silence, or "we'll backfill." A solo data hire in an organization with no other data people has nobody to learn from and no growth path, and tends to leave at right about the point the pipelines they built start breaking.
"Is this a project with an end date, or a program with a permanent owner?"
A named owner, a standing budget line, and a way to keep verifying the answers are still right as your vendors change their schemas underneath you.
A statement of work with a completion date. That's the consultant shape, and it decays the same way whether the person is internal or not. Answers under continuous test is the least visible cost and the one that quietly kills builds after the demo succeeds.
Got the answers? Now check them against what each path requires. Work through the conditions →
Check what you actually have.
No score, and no verdict from us. These are the conditions each path needs. Read them, count your own boxes, and notice where a column runs out.
Build the function
- Data capability is a strategic differentiator you'll fund for years. The handful of operators building real tech arms fit here.
- You can genuinely win recruiting fights for data talent against employers that pay more and offer peers.
- Your stakeholders can wait 12 to 18 months for answers they trust.
Run it on the systems you have
- Your data questions outnumber your data staff. If you're one of the 54%, that's every question.
- The CFO and the board want answers inside this budget cycle.
- Your IT roadmap is already full of the migrations and security work only your team can do.
Invert the order
- You want the capability now and the headcount later, in that order.
- An analyst you hire next year should be productive on day one, asking better questions of a system that works.
- You'd rather prove the value before you defend the headcount in a budget meeting.
If a column came up short, the next conversation is with vendors. Here's what to demand from them →
Take this into everyvendor conversation.
The first three bars below are the same ones an internal build has to clear. Hold every path to them: the hire plan, the consultant, and every vendor, including us.
Ask for a live demo of each one. Don't accept the claim.
Whichever way the checklist goes, the first move is the same. Start with your own data →
Before it's a hire decision,it's a readiness question.
Both paths assume your data can actually answer the questions your executives keep asking. Across 6 to 10 systems that were never built to talk to each other, that's worth checking before you commit a year or sign a contract.
Start with one export, or challenge us with as many of those systems as you'd like. More sources means the report can show how they connect and where the joins break, which is the actual question when the EHR, the workforce platform and the CRM were never built to talk to each other. In 3 to 5 business days Querri sends back a branded 4 to 5 page report on what's clean, what's broken, and which of your executives' questions your data could already answer. It's free and it's yours to keep either way. Your file comes back or gets deleted on request.
Before you commit a year,see what your data can support.
Start with one export, or challenge us with as many of your systems as you'd like. In 3 to 5 business days you get a branded 4 to 5 page report: what's clean, what's broken, and which questions your data could already answer. Free, and yours to keep.