Business intelligence (BI) tools (Looker, Tableau, Mode, Metabase, etc.) are designed to support your organization's reporting and analysis needs by providing ready-made visualizations, dashboards, and reports. They are especially useful for analyzing large, complex datasets and making the data available to a wide range of users within your organization.
BI dashboards are great tools to access your company's top metrics at a quick glance. But even with the biggest data teams and all the dashboards in the world, they're not adopted by your business teams who are still working on old-school sheets and having to undergo lifelong data preparation time.
Business needs outpace what is made available in dashboards.
Business needs outpace what is made available in dashboards. What reaches the form of a BI dashboard is the result of multiple ad-hoc analyses happening in business iterations, discussions and sharing across teams in the form of presentations, docs, discussions or messages. When a new business metric gets created and the teams agree on the data views they frequently need, then only it makes its way to a dashboard.
BI tools are typically used by a limited number of users who are often isolated in their data analysis efforts. Ad-hoc analysis, on the other hand, often requires the cooperation of different teams and departments. Ad-hoc analysis often requires rapid operation and the ability to quickly iterate through data analysis. BI tools can be relatively time-consuming to set up and deploy and can become a bottleneck when performing ad-hoc analysis.
It's hard for organizations to keep track of what is shared, and how it's analyzed, then presented until you end up with a miscalculation of Revenues or Costs that makes it to the Board meeting deck.
Business teams share information in the form of presentations, docs, and messages. It's hard for organizations to keep track of what is shared, and how it's analyzed, then presented until you end up with a miscalculation of Revenues or Costs that makes it to the Board meeting deck. You also see business teams updating the same documents over and over whether it's for a weekly, monthly, or quarterly business review, or that pitch deck #999
BI tools are typically used by a limited number of users who are often isolated in their data analysis efforts. Ad-hoc analysis, on the other hand, often requires the cooperation of different teams and departments.
