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The ugly truth of BI tools is that they are of most benefit to the organizations which are least capable of using them. The goal of properly exploiting BI come

by jl6 5y ago

The ugly truth of BI tools is that they are of most benefit to the organizations which are least capable of using them. The goal of properly exploiting BI comes with many prerequisites which sound superficially reasonable but turn out to be decade-long side-quests. Things like having all your data in one data model. Things like understanding where your data comes from, and exactly what it means. These prerequisites are easy for small orgs, but small orgs benefit least from BI and typically get better bang-for-buck from Excel. Large orgs find themselves mired in the political meta-problems of meeting those prerequisites, like joining up the fiefdoms that own data sources with the cabals that run data governance and the accountants who want a return on the investment of simplifying a sprawling legacy estate. BI tools are generally incredibly poor at dealing with the bag-of-spanners heterogeneous data landscapes that exist in these organizations, and their analytics nirvana remains largely unattainable. The trend that the article describes - towards simpler, composable BI components, each with more modest goals - is progress. It helps move focus away from the relatively-easy problem of visualization, to the rest of the data stack.

Foobar8568 5y ago
Or that most people are totally clueless about their own companies, processes and data.
mberning 5y ago
This is so true. I worked a BI tooling startup and it was a lot of fun. But the big clients all had the same types of issues which ultimately dooms their quest. At some point the CFO, CTO, CEO notices they are spending more on “BI” than marketing and they start to get very curious about what they are getting for their money. It’s never quite what they expect.
toyg 5y ago
> BI tools are generally incredibly poor at dealing with the bag-of-spanners heterogeneous data landscapes It's not that they are poor, it's that they eventually require some moderately-challenging coding - because there is only so much complexity you can hide behind point&click before things become untractable. Programmers get bored doing BI plumbing, and those commercial ecosystems are quite secretive and often expensive to train in; so the talent pool is small and costs can skyrocket pretty quickly, making the whole proposition unappealing. Maybe if we accepted that "BI Programmer" is a respectable career and something that is fundamentally unavoidable, providing clear career paths inside companies for it, instead of trying so hard (and failing) to get rid of such figures as soon as they progress a bit, there would be more predictability and less angst in the space.

by jl6 5y ago

Foobar8568 5y ago

Or that most people are totally clueless about their own companies, processes and data.

mberning 5y ago

This is so true. I worked a BI tooling startup and it was a lot of fun. But the big clients all had the same types of issues which ultimately dooms their quest. At some point the CFO, CTO, CEO notices they are spending more on “BI” than marketing and they start to get very curious about what they are getting for their money. It’s never quite what they expect.

toyg 5y ago

> BI tools are generally incredibly poor at dealing with the bag-of-spanners heterogeneous data landscapes It's not that they are poor, it's that they eventually require some moderately-challenging coding - because there is only so much complexity you can hide behind point&click before things become untractable. Programmers get bored doing BI plumbing, and those commercial ecosystems are quite secretive and often expensive to train in; so the talent pool is small and costs can skyrocket pretty quickly, making the whole proposition unappealing. Maybe if we accepted that "BI Programmer" is a respectable career and something that is fundamentally unavoidable, providing clear career paths inside companies for it, instead of trying so hard (and failing) to get rid of such figures as soon as they progress a bit, there would be more predictability and less angst in the space.