Comment by 7thaccount
12 hours ago
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?
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.
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.
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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