Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is BI dead? – On dismantling data's ship of Theseus

benn.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 118 posts

Re: Is BI dead? – On dismantling data's ship of Theseus

#41

Post by geodel »

pram wrote: post #35
the_af wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. To me, you seem to be conflating some pieces of data infra plumbing with very sensible and concrete goals (Kafka, Hadoop) with others that are adjacent tools which may or may not make sense. Regardless of any tech details, the idea behind Kafka makes a lot of sense: https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-wha... Or did you mean, "I have no idea what business needs all this data for", a m…

It can become the opposite of sensible, very easily. I've had devs demand to use Kafka for storing 100mb+ blobs (which of course required a custom broker config + cluster)

Indeed. The idea that somehow Kafka is beyond reproach seems amusing to me.

Re: Is BI dead? – On dismantling data's ship of Theseus

#42

Post by FranzFerdiNaN »

monkeydust wrote: post #17

As 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 work as a data engineer in a BI team, with our product being part of a large software suite in healthcare. We got a small number power users who really use the dashboards, who get real result from them and who actively help our development. We also got a larger group of people who use it once in a while.

But most people seem to log in once or twice and then never again. And if you ask why it’s often because they couldn’t find the answer to their incredibly specific one-time only question, so they decided it’s all useless and they continue to work on their own personal homegrown BI-suite in excel.

Also, we use Qlik and I absolutely hate it. Luckily I don’t have to work with it too often but whenever I do I feel like I’m always fighting it. Using Power BI and Tableau felt much more like working together to solve issues.

Re: Is BI dead? – On dismantling data's ship of Theseus

#43

Post by Guest42 »

marcinzm wrote: post #25
monkeydust wrote: post #17

As 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…

Having used looker, it felt rather clunky and proprietary

I was generally able to create better results via power bi, ssrs, or shiny

Re: Is BI dead? – On dismantling data's ship of Theseus

#44

Post by gav »

monkeydust wrote: post #29
TOMDM wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is the direction that I'd like to see more people moving in: pushing insights to users rather than expecting users to come to dashboards and get those insights.

Nobody is saying "I'd love another tool that I am expected to check every day", both embedded analytics and insights are how to drive adoption and unlock value from data.

Re: Is BI dead? – On dismantling data's ship of Theseus

#45

Post by molsongolden »

PhilipA wrote: post #33

I do believe that we have seen solutions trying to be a horizontal solution to problems, and I think the evolution will turn into vertical solutions. I have also invested a lot of time, as we are a couple of people who has been building on a vertical BI tool for the SaaS space for about a year. The main goals are: - Easy accessible for novice users. We want to make the Google for BI to help empower non-technical peop…

Interested in learning more but it looks like your DMs aren't open.

Re: Is BI dead? – On dismantling data's ship of Theseus

#46

Post by clusterhacks »

pram wrote: post #30

I’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 gr…

Similar experience for me. Years ago I made a decision to jump into data engineering and reporting instead of pushing more into enterprise app development (meaning, Java/C# stuff).

I share the question about a solution searching for a problem. I will say that I continue to see efforts being made that seem focused on adding a bullet point to some executive leader's yearly accomplishments rather than specifically providing value back to an org . . .

Re: Is BI dead? – On dismantling data's ship of Theseus

#47

Post by PhilipA »

molsongolden wrote: post #45
PhilipA wrote: post #33

I do believe that we have seen solutions trying to be a horizontal solution to problems, and I think the evolution will turn into vertical solutions. I have also invested a lot of time, as we are a couple of people who has been building on a vertical BI tool for the SaaS space for about a year. The main goals are: - Easy accessible for novice users. We want to make the Google for BI to help empower non-technical peop…

Interested in learning more but it looks like your DMs aren't open.

Just follow me and I can follow you back.

Re: Is BI dead? – On dismantling data's ship of Theseus

#48

Post by TOMDM »

gav wrote: post #44
monkeydust wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is the direction that I'd like to see more people moving in: pushing insights to users rather than expecting users to come to dashboards and get those insights. Nobody is saying "I'd love another tool that I am expected to check every day", both embedded analytics and insights are how to drive adoption and unlock value from data.

Are there any good examples of this already out there?

It feels like a good idea, but I imagine it would be very fragile in black swan events.

Maybe a mix?

Provide the dashboards, but allow users to set up alerts/workflows, they understand the problem well, and if they know what they're going to be going to the dash to find, let them skip that step. In case something new happens, they can set up a new alert/workflow/whatever for the next time it happens.

Re: Is BI dead? – On dismantling data's ship of Theseus

#49

Post by marcinzm »

Guest42 wrote: post #43
marcinzm wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Having used looker, it felt rather clunky and proprietary I was generally able to create better results via power bi, ssrs, or shiny

As I understood it the goal of Looker isn't to make the lives of people who can use something like Shiny better but rather the lives of people who use pivot tables 99% of the time. So rather than having technical analysts making dashboards you have business analysts making dashboards (or at least digging into generic dashboards).

Re: Is BI dead? – On dismantling data's ship of Theseus

#50

Post by RandomLensman »

TOMDM wrote: post #22
monkeydust wrote: post #17

As 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…

I'd add a fourth: having no idea or model how the past relates to future/what are predictors of success or failure in the data
Post reply on HN