This seems like a promotion for Salesforce.
Is BI dead? – On dismantling data's ship of Theseus
21–30 of 118 posts
Re: Is BI dead? – On dismantling data's ship of Theseus
#22As someone who runs teams deploying BI to internal stakeholders (product, sales) I am pretty fed up with them. Firstly Tableau, QlikView or PowerBI are all pretty much doing the same thing whatever flavour you prefer. We find that maybe 10% of users will actually use them to garner new actionable insights and 90% will moan there's too much data for them to process and no one appreciates the immense amount of data mun…
I've been doing a fair amount of BI work myself recently.
I reckon of the 90% that don't make any data driven decisions with the dashboards they're provided, there are three causes I run into frequently.
1. They can't describe what info they need
2. That info isn't available.
3. They don't make decisions based on data at all.
I feel I'm getting better at addressing 1 and 2 the more I do it, but I figure there's a fair amount from group 3 who demand the reports nonetheless...
As an aside, you mention Tableau, QlikView or PowerBI, have you tried Apache Superset at all?
Re: Is BI dead? – On dismantling data's ship of Theseus
#23As someone who runs teams deploying BI to internal stakeholders (product, sales) I am pretty fed up with them. Firstly Tableau, QlikView or PowerBI are all pretty much doing the same thing whatever flavour you prefer. We find that maybe 10% of users will actually use them to garner new actionable insights and 90% will moan there's too much data for them to process and no one appreciates the immense amount of data mun…
I couldn't agree more! We built Lexio to address exactly that issue. (Our tagline is literally "Stop building dashboards that no one uses".) It does data storytelling (discovering the insights and conveying them in natural language) on the server and gives users a newsfeed experience for consuming them. I'm happy to talk shop if folks are interested in how it works. https://narrativescience.com/lexio
Re: Is BI dead? – On dismantling data's ship of Theseus
#24As someone who runs teams deploying BI to internal stakeholders (product, sales) I am pretty fed up with them. Firstly Tableau, QlikView or PowerBI are all pretty much doing the same thing whatever flavour you prefer. We find that maybe 10% of users will actually use them to garner new actionable insights and 90% will moan there's too much data for them to process and no one appreciates the immense amount of data mun…
I've been doing a fair amount of BI work myself recently. I reckon of the 90% that don't make any data driven decisions with the dashboards they're provided, there are three causes I run into frequently. 1. They can't describe what info they need 2. That info isn't available. 3. They don't make decisions based on data at all. I feel I'm getting better at addressing 1 and 2 the more I do it, but I figure there's a fai…
> there's a fair amount from group 3 who demand the reports nonetheless...
It’s a very important function: provide data that can be cherry-picked to support a decision already made.
If the decision is too complex for that, hire a big consulting firm to write a report suggesting and justifying the action desired.
A decison staple surely going back millennia.
Re: Is BI dead? – On dismantling data's ship of Theseus
#25As someone who runs teams deploying BI to internal stakeholders (product, sales) I am pretty fed up with them. Firstly Tableau, QlikView or PowerBI are all pretty much doing the same thing whatever flavour you prefer. We find that maybe 10% of users will actually use them to garner new actionable insights and 90% will moan there's too much data for them to process and no one appreciates the immense amount of data mun…
I run a data team. We do two things:
* Provide a clean minimal view of the data that other teams can pivot table on top of or download in the BI tool. We do onboarding, support and all that for this data.
* Provide dashboards and reports for more complicated ongoing questions that require data that's not cleaned yet.
We don't use Looker but based on the sales demo it seems optimized for this type of workflow. The core analytics team maintains the data and complex workflows while other teams have business analysts for day to day questions.
Re: Is BI dead? – On dismantling data's ship of Theseus
#26Not sure why the author spent half the article writing about Salesforce which turned out to be entirely irrelevant.
Oh, I OTOH really enjoyed the historical perspective they sketched. I appreciated the work put in to give some context.
Re: Is BI dead? – On dismantling data's ship of Theseus
#27As someone who runs teams deploying BI to internal stakeholders (product, sales) I am pretty fed up with them. Firstly Tableau, QlikView or PowerBI are all pretty much doing the same thing whatever flavour you prefer. We find that maybe 10% of users will actually use them to garner new actionable insights and 90% will moan there's too much data for them to process and no one appreciates the immense amount of data mun…
I run a data team. We do two things: * Provide a clean minimal view of the data that other teams can pivot table on top of or download in the BI tool. We do onboarding, support and all that for this data. * Provide dashboards and reports for more complicated ongoing questions that require data that's not cleaned yet. We don't use Looker but based on the sales demo it seems optimized for this type of workflow. The cor…
This is the direction where most BI work is heading for: you need a team of data engineers that can make sure that the data for your BI dashboards is delivered and in a good quality. Everything else that doesn’t need it is probably simple enough to be run as some PowerBI dashboard on top of production DB. I think today most effort in those heavier BI cases is spent on data transformations and making sure that data flows/batch jobs run uninterrupted.
Re: Is BI dead? – On dismantling data's ship of Theseus
#28>BI should include all consumption
we use Microsoft PowerBI. it work great within the Microsoft ecosystem. if you try to pull data from NetSuite with PowerBI. it went to crap.
Re: Is BI dead? – On dismantling data's ship of Theseus
#29As someone who runs teams deploying BI to internal stakeholders (product, sales) I am pretty fed up with them. Firstly Tableau, QlikView or PowerBI are all pretty much doing the same thing whatever flavour you prefer. We find that maybe 10% of users will actually use them to garner new actionable insights and 90% will moan there's too much data for them to process and no one appreciates the immense amount of data mun…
I've been doing a fair amount of BI work myself recently. I reckon of the 90% that don't make any data driven decisions with the dashboards they're provided, there are three causes I run into frequently. 1. They can't describe what info they need 2. That info isn't available. 3. They don't make decisions based on data at all. I feel I'm getting better at addressing 1 and 2 the more I do it, but I figure there's a fai…
Yes on 3.
One way to solve is to automate the action from insight part and inject into users workflow. I am looking at this now with support of senior sales stakeholders.
Simple example:
Client X activity has been trending down vs it's peer group, Call Client X to understand what's going on.
Re: Is BI dead? – On dismantling data's ship of Theseus
#30I’ve spent the last 10 years of my life building “Big Data” platforms for companies (Kafka, Druid, Hadoop, Databricks, Presto, Teradata, Informatica, MicroStrategy, etc etc) and I still have no idea what people need most of this crap for. There’s so much duplicative functionality, and a basically never ending list of OLAP adjacent products emerging every year. I mean it’s good for me personally, it’s pretty much a gravy train, but I always question if a lot of it is a solution searching for a problem lol