I have been providing data to business users for the last 24 years. It doesn't matter if we give them a query tool, MS Access, Power BI or a data cube in Excel, there are only a small number of users who will actually use the tools. My guess is these are the same users who would have done analysis with data scraped from terminals and printed reports 40 years ago. For what it is worth, execs do like a dashboard with key metrics and the new BI tools make it a lot easier to write and maintain KPI dashboards.
I love discovering the people inside enterprises who don’t realise how awesome they are at coding. They might be a “personal assistant” or something but they hack on sharepoint forms or access or excel and make it sing - acknowledging their clever skills and giving them more powerful tools is awesome. Then they leave for a better job… brilliant!
Yeah, title inflation / deflation based on DEI quotas are still the elephant in the room.
Of course the guy backpacking the contract making $20 an hour is gonna have something adverse to think of his "CSR" title relative to a few salaried watering hole loiters/"Software Engineers" who's biggest achievements are having named an Excel sheet 4 years ago and googling a Salesforce configuration option and misplaining it.
> My guess is these are the same users who would have done analysis with data scraped from terminals and printed reports 40 years ago.
Back in the early computing days, most of the work was done on the large, shared, mainframe computers. The computers were so costly, that the "computer division" was it's own, separate division of the corporation that had premises with the other divisions. For example the Western Division made products, but if it wanted computer resources, it contracted with the Computer Division, who handily had mainframes installed onsite.
Our group was a feisty, small internal analysis group using the new, "cheap" mini computers. One of our points of service was simply being much more reactive to the users needs, we could simply respond more easily because of how the funding worked.
To you point about "data scraped", we were walking through the plant and saw one of our users with one of our reports. They were cutting the lines out of the green bar report, taping them to another piece of paper, and photocopying it. They were sorting the report by a different criteria. We told them "You know, we can do that for you!" "Oh really!?"
People that need to Get Stuff Done, get it done. Our goals as service providers (which is what we in the computer systems groups are, service providers to our internal customers), is to make that as efficient as possible.
Another person was using a PC, our tablet digitizer, and Autocad to record the points on aircraft to generate radar profiles. It was an inventive use of the digitizer, not for fundamental CAD work, but simple data capture from the drawings in Jane's Combat Aircraft.
Sometimes I am engaged to build software to integrate some systems together, and will simply configure or expose exisiting dashboards to the client. Usually the dashboard blows them away, and they can't believe they had this data all along. Integrations are necessary business operations but the stakeholders fucking love digestible data. It's a really easy value add.
