Comment by Esophagus4
12 hours ago
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.
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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