<story><title>Is BI dead? – On dismantling data&apos;s ship of Theseus</title><url>https://benn.substack.com/p/is-bi-dead</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>monkeydust</author><text>As someone who runs teams deploying BI to internal stakeholders (product, sales) I am pretty fed up with them.&lt;p&gt;Firstly Tableau, QlikView or PowerBI are all pretty much doing the same thing whatever flavour you prefer.&lt;p&gt;We find that maybe 10% of users will actually use them to garner new actionable insights and 90% will moan there&amp;#x27;s too much data for them to process and no one appreciates the immense amount of data munging that goes on behind the scenes to make those pretty graphs.&lt;p&gt;Where do we go? Personally I see a lot of the insights being automated and turned into actions on the server side without anyone touching a BI tool. This can be achieved with rules based approach and perhaps some correlation, trend analysis over time series data. Where you do need to go beyond that then perhaps AR&amp;#x2F;VR will provide a novel and more valuable approach.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>blakeburch</author><text>I see things going the same direction. I&amp;#x27;ve always been pretty anti-dashboard because of the lack of long-term utility. If you want to make data-driven decisions, you need to spend the time codifying the decision making process and automating that. Automated actioning off data is far more impactful than automated visualization of data.&lt;p&gt;When it comes to business stakeholders, the biggest obstacle is trust. If you&amp;#x27;re not a data person, or a developer, decision logic being gated behind code is a scary black box. &amp;quot;If I can&amp;#x27;t control it, I can&amp;#x27;t trust it&amp;quot;. That feeling gets even worse when we build systems that are controlled by AI or ML.&lt;p&gt;I think we need more solutions for data teams that allow business stakeholders to take part in the automated workflow deployment. Let them see how things are connected together. Let them verify that the decisions are being made correctly every day. Let them tweak levers so they have a say in how things are working. That&amp;#x27;s the only way to move beyond the current environment where everyone wants a dashboard, but no one looks at it.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s a big problem I&amp;#x27;m aiming to solve right now.</text></comment>
<story><title>Is BI dead? – On dismantling data&apos;s ship of Theseus</title><url>https://benn.substack.com/p/is-bi-dead</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>monkeydust</author><text>As someone who runs teams deploying BI to internal stakeholders (product, sales) I am pretty fed up with them.&lt;p&gt;Firstly Tableau, QlikView or PowerBI are all pretty much doing the same thing whatever flavour you prefer.&lt;p&gt;We find that maybe 10% of users will actually use them to garner new actionable insights and 90% will moan there&amp;#x27;s too much data for them to process and no one appreciates the immense amount of data munging that goes on behind the scenes to make those pretty graphs.&lt;p&gt;Where do we go? Personally I see a lot of the insights being automated and turned into actions on the server side without anyone touching a BI tool. This can be achieved with rules based approach and perhaps some correlation, trend analysis over time series data. Where you do need to go beyond that then perhaps AR&amp;#x2F;VR will provide a novel and more valuable approach.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SilverRed</author><text>We provide power bi access to the data our app runs on and it has been a mixed bag. The customers absolutely love it. But they build dashboards where hitting the refresh button can bring a super expensive db to its knees for half an hour.&lt;p&gt;So then we have to get our db people in to rewrite all of their reports so they don&amp;#x27;t do this which eliminated the benefit of having the customers do it.&lt;p&gt;In the end there is just no avoiding having experts build the dashboards.</text></comment>