Comments on: What question does this answer? http://www.proteanit.com/b/2009/07/24/what-question-does-this-answer/ pro·te·an (prō'tē-ən, prō-tē'-) "Exhibiting considerable versatility or diversity" Fri, 30 Jul 2010 20:54:46 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.0.7 by: BI Monkey http://www.proteanit.com/b/2009/07/24/what-question-does-this-answer/#comment-24637 Mon, 27 Jul 2009 00:18:24 +0000 http://www.proteanit.com/b/2009/07/24/what-question-does-this-answer/#comment-24637 My first significant BI project is a good case for this. I was a techy person put in to "sort out" the reporting. There were huge problems - data was suspect, existing reports were inconsistent, mainframe developers were long gone. So I solved the technical problems. Data was cleansed, reconciled and reliable, and we had decent ETL, OLAP and tools. And when any attempt to access the data left my department, it failed. I had failed to grasp just how data illiterate the rest of the company was. So I had built a beautiful, flexible system that was easy to understand - from my point of view. I had overestimated the users and underestimated the "sales" effort required to get them to even *think* about data. In hindsight, one of my most useful lessons learned in my career. Shame I didn't grasp it until a few years after I was out of that role! My first significant BI project is a good case for this. I was a techy person put in to “sort out” the reporting. There were huge problems - data was suspect, existing reports were inconsistent, mainframe developers were long gone.

So I solved the technical problems. Data was cleansed, reconciled and reliable, and we had decent ETL, OLAP and tools. And when any attempt to access the data left my department, it failed.

I had failed to grasp just how data illiterate the rest of the company was. So I had built a beautiful, flexible system that was easy to understand - from my point of view. I had overestimated the users and underestimated the “sales” effort required to get them to even *think* about data.

In hindsight, one of my most useful lessons learned in my career. Shame I didn’t grasp it until a few years after I was out of that role!

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