That's a pretty specific example when there are a lot of good "spreadsheet people" out there who do a lot more than spreadsheets (maybe they had to write SQL queries or scripts to get those numbers), but commonly need to simplify things down to a spreadsheet or power point for upper management. I'm not saying you should have multiple people doing redundant work, but this style isn't entirely dumb.

What would this be replaced by? Some kind of large SAP like system that costs millions of dollars and requires a dozen IT staff to maintain?

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Esophagus4 21 hours ago | parent [-]

Fair - I was creating a straw man mostly to make a point. The people I’m thinking aren’t running SQL queries or scripts, they’re merely collection points for data.

So one good BI developer who knows Tableau and Salesforce and Excel and SQL can replace those pure collection points with a better process, but they can also generate insight into the data because they have some business understanding from being close to the teams, which is what my hypothetical Brenda can’t do.

In my example, Brenda would be asking sales leaders to enter in their data instead of going into Salesforce herself because she doesn’t know that tool / side of the company well enough.

I was making the point that, contrary to the article, the Brendas I know aren’t touched by the Excel angels, they’re just maintaining spreadsheets that we probably shouldn’t have anyway.

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7thaccount 20 hours ago | parent [-]

I think that is a fair point too. The person that builds the Tableau dashboard could just send Brenda a screenshot once a month and that saves everyone time.

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simonw 20 hours ago | parent [-]

A screenshot of a Tableau dashboard is possibly the most dangerous form of internal data communication there is, because it entirely removes any chance of digging into that dashboard and figuring out what queries created it and spotting the incorrect assumptions they made along the way.

A hill I will die on is that business analytics need "view source" or they aren't worth the pixels they are rendered with.

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7thaccount 18 hours ago | parent [-]

I respectfully disagree. The amount of folks in upper management that can actually use something like Tableau is very small. However it doesn't matter as none of those people have the time outside of very small businesses which probably don't need it anyway. The business intelligence person is supposed to deliver succinct insights to upper management to act on, not say "here's a cool system I built you... figure it out yourself". Executives aren't getting paid $$$$$$$$ to do data analysis. Hopefully I'm not misrepresenting your point.

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simonw 18 hours ago | parent [-]

The view source link isn't there so upper management who don't know SQL can look at it. It's there so other people in the organization who do know SQL have the opportunity to check the work.

At my last large employer I genuinely lost count of the number of times I saw a BI report which pulled numbers from our data warehouse... and then found out it had misinterpreted a key detail because the engineering team had changed some table design six months ago and the data analysis team hadn't been told about the change.

	▲	7thaccount 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		We're talking about different things than. I agree it's helpful to have an open system that the technical staff can drill into. I'm just saying at the end of the day that the key decision makers don't care. They need some simple high level metrics that can be put into some relatively simple charts and tables.