Is BI dead? – On dismantling data's ship of Theseus
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Is BI dead? – On dismantling data's ship of Theseus
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Re: Is BI dead? – On dismantling data's ship of Theseus
#2If you make it to the 8th paragraph, you may learn that "BI" stands for "business intelligence".
Re: Is BI dead? – On dismantling data's ship of Theseus
#3If you make it to the 8th paragraph, you may learn that "BI" stands for "business intelligence".
If, like me, you've sustained enough corporate brain damage, you assumed that's what it meant from reading the headline.
Re: Is BI dead? – On dismantling data's ship of Theseus
#4Re: Is BI dead? – On dismantling data's ship of Theseus
#5[deleted]
Re: Is BI dead? – On dismantling data's ship of Theseus
#6If you make it to the 8th paragraph, you may learn that "BI" stands for "business intelligence".
And what it actually means is "visualizations and dashboards". Why make decisions based on analyzing the data from a report when you can get a vague impression from a pretty chart and go with that instead?
IMX, the core problem is that all BI software is built around the idea that everything is a financial value that can always be arbitrarily aggregated meaningfully, and that looking pretty is more important than presenting the data in a way that your organization actually finds logical.
It's a way to sell very expensive software to decision-makers, while also producing software complex enough that it can't be configured well enough to properly evaluate until well after you've already bought it. Only then do you find that the feature set is very broad, but very shallow. It's only 18 months later that you discover how limited the report writer is, or that you have to do it this one way for everything even if you really could use it formatted slightly differently.
It's like using a pivot table in Excel and trying to control the order of the columns, or to make one table aggregate two values distinctly, etc. You end up with 10 seconds to pull your data and create the table, and 4 hours trying to get it to display in the manner you want before giving up.
Re: Is BI dead? – On dismantling data's ship of Theseus
#7If you make it to the 8th paragraph, you may learn that "BI" stands for "business intelligence".
And what it actually means is "visualizations and dashboards". Why make decisions based on analyzing the data from a report when you can get a vague impression from a pretty chart and go with that instead? IMX, the core problem is that all BI software is built around the idea that everything is a financial value that can always be arbitrarily aggregated meaningfully, and that looking pretty is more important than pre…
Where I've worked BI wasn't ever used by decision makers. It's used to make dashboards that are part of a sales pitch to clients, because clients love pretty pictures and "science".
Re: Is BI dead? – On dismantling data's ship of Theseus
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
And what it actually means is "visualizations and dashboards". Why make decisions based on analyzing the data from a report when you can get a vague impression from a pretty chart and go with that instead? IMX, the core problem is that all BI software is built around the idea that everything is a financial value that can always be arbitrarily aggregated meaningfully, and that looking pretty is more important than pre…
Where I've worked BI wasn't ever used by decision makers. It's used to make dashboards that are part of a sales pitch to clients, because clients love pretty pictures and "science".
If you can pepper in the phrase "single pane of glass" you will be sure to hook em with the sale pitch.
Re: Is BI dead? – On dismantling data's ship of Theseus
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
And what it actually means is "visualizations and dashboards". Why make decisions based on analyzing the data from a report when you can get a vague impression from a pretty chart and go with that instead? IMX, the core problem is that all BI software is built around the idea that everything is a financial value that can always be arbitrarily aggregated meaningfully, and that looking pretty is more important than pre…
Where I've worked BI wasn't ever used by decision makers. It's used to make dashboards that are part of a sales pitch to clients, because clients love pretty pictures and "science".
This matches my experience entirely. BI was not for making good decisions, it was for making better sales pitches.
Re: Is BI dead? – On dismantling data's ship of Theseus
#10I remember learing decades ago that "In UNIX, everything is a file"
I approach BI now as "In BI, everything is in your database".
With everything in the database (SQL Server in my case) I can deliver BI to my users with quality tools like Tableau and Power BI - or just with generic web reports.