Heard on Reddit: "The most frustrating thing about working in BI"
This topic posted last week on r/businessintelligence echoed many of the challenges with people & process that I hear every day from data leaders.
Which is the most relevant challenge that you face, either as an internal customer of data experts or as one yourself?
If you have done your job right it will look like you have done nothing at all.
The easier it is for the users to use, the harder it is for us to create.
Spend weeks building something that’s really complex, really cool, and really really clever. Then when you show the business they go, “great - can I print it out?” No, look all these tooltips and filters and drill throughs, you can slice the data here and compare it year on year or versus budget..........ok here’s how you print it.
"How do I export to Excel?"
I usually phrase questions as multiple choice. Do you want that for 2018, the last 365 days, or something else? When you say performance, is that x, or y, or z? (Or something else)?. And then maybe they choose...maybe you can suggest, etc.
A lot of people would rather to wait days be served than learn a new tool to get served in under 5 minutes.
Users just don't know how to talk about what they want sometimes.
God forbid (the result) doesn't fit their narrative. Or worse, they are invested in the existing model and using evidence against it is seen as something between manipulating facts and witchcraft that can't be trusted.
The biggest mistake I've seen people make is to invest a ton of money into the data infrastructure and skim on the visualization and user interaction. Why do you have the data if people can't manipulate it to their liking?
That sleek and minimalist look takes a %@$& ton of time.
We're reluctant to use Tableau because of the licenses. I'm stuck with SSRS.
How about instead of making everything precise, we make it "directionally accurate". Stop wasting time on precision for quick decisions. Picture the fuel gauge on the dash of a car. "E" to "F" scale with hashes. Not very precise, but good enough for me to decide whether I'm going to get gas.
I hate Jane in Finance. Especially when she has John, her supervisor, ask for her report, which she does by hand every morning in Excel, to be automated. But it has to be in Excel too and be in exactly the same format. So then you spend a full day to make that happen. However, Jane instead of using the report which is now automatically emailed to her every morning decides that she does not like this, trust it and proceeds to still create her report by hand every single morning - even though the numbers they produce are the same - further wasting her time in addition to the full day you spent making the report come to her automatically. I hate Jane in Finance.