Illustration of a marionette figure that has cut its own strings

Rho Lall

BI Architect

I bring down ruthless clarity on complex problems.

I build systems that recover revenue for real businesses.

I document solutions for both human and machine readers.

Phoenix, AZ

View from a kayak on a river, with rocks breaking the surface and others just below it

You probably already know where the friction is.

The process that still depends on one person knowing what to do.
The numbers that trigger a debate before they can trigger a decision.
The project everyone agrees matters, but nobody can quite get moving.
The report everyone loves to doubt.

The hard part usually isn't finding more problems.

It's figuring out what the problems are actually telling you.

Aerial view of a raked zen garden, concentric lines circling dark stones

See the problem differently.

Follow the Friction is a short, AI-guided executive session built around one goal:

Help you connect the dots inside your business and identify what deserves your focus.

You know what you know. But this will enable you to test assumptions, surface contradictions, expose hidden dependencies, and follow the implications.

Because the problem you bring in may not be the problem you leave with.

What looks like a reporting problemmight be an ownership problem.
What looks like a technology problemmight be a process problem.
What looks like an isolated workaroundmight be evidence that the business has outgrown a decision made years ago.

That's the point.

This is for businesses that got more complicated as they grew.

Especially growing e-commerce and lifestyle brands where systems like NetSuite, Snowflake, and Looker now sit between more people, more processes, and more decisions than they used to.

The business works. But it has become harder to understand from end to end.

You can feel it when a simple question requires three people.
When two departments bring different numbers to the same meeting.
When a project crosses enough systems that nobody quite owns the whole thing.
When the person who "just knows how it works" becomes part of the infrastructure.

Still water at dawn reflecting forested mountains, with a single ripple spreading across the surface

What's on your mind?

What's taking up space?

Maybe your numbers don't agree.
Maybe too much knowledge still lives in people's heads.
Maybe the business has outgrown systems that used to work perfectly well.
Maybe a manual workaround has quietly become part of how the company operates.
Maybe you're considering a major data, AI, reporting, or technology initiative and aren't sure what has to be true first.
Maybe you just know something feels harder than it should.

Start there.

Start where there is friction. See where it leads.

What you'll leave with.

The session is designed to help you uncover:

Patterns you may not have connected before
What appears to deserve deeper attention
Why it matters to the business
What the current situation may be costing you
What still needs to be understood before making a decision

You won't leave with a canned maturity score or a generic checklist.

You'll leave with a clearer way to think about what's happening.

Raked sand garden at low sun, the neat lines curving and breaking around a single buried stone

Technically Correct is Still Wrong.

I'm a BI Architect. My work sits in the space between the systems and the business trying to use them.

That has taught me to be suspicious of technically correct answers to business problems. A dashboard can be fast and still fail the people relying on it. A data platform can be healthy while nobody trusts the number. A system can follow best practices and still be painful to change.

And increasingly, business logic has to make sense to more than just the person who built it. It has to be understandable to the next person, the next system, and the machines beginning to work alongside them.

So I look beyond whether something works.

I want to know what depends on it, who trusts it, what happens around it, and what the business has quietly learned to compensate for.

That's usually where the interesting problem is.

I write about these problems on Substack

A kite high in a golden evening sky, its string running down toward the ground

Years of decisions are baked into your business.

Some live in code.

Some live in dashboards.

Some live in spreadsheets.

Some live in people's heads.

As the business grows, those decisions become connected in ways that are increasingly difficult to see from inside the company.

Sometimes you need someone outside the web to help you see the web.

Start Your Session.

Bring whatever feels harder than it should. We'll start there.