Your Data Team is a Fire Station. Almost Nothing Is an Emergency. The message came in 15 minutes before closing and it had the word "Quick" in the subject line. Subject: Quick Request Body: Board meeting tomorrow at 9. Can we get retention by customer segment, three years back? Should be quick. I want to be fair to the person
Self-Service BI is an Illusion Pick a card. Any card. It was an exceedingly corporate Thursday, and I watched Rachel from Finance give the best demo my BI program has ever received, and I didn't build a single pixel of it. It was the quarterly business review. She walked the room through a
The "Goldilocks" Data Governance Team How to size and structure a data governance team to be juuuuust right. The calendar invite said "Enterprise Data Governance Council - Monthly Sync." Thirty-four names on the invite list. Nineteen joined. The first six minutes were spent confirming that everyone could, in fact, see the screen. Then
Your Report Isn't Slow. It's Misdiagnosed. Three weeks of treatment. One overdue consult. The message arrived at 7:42 AM on a Monday: "The Ops Master Report won't load. Quarterly review at 10 AM. Please advise." I knew the report. Everyone knew the report. The Operations Master Report was 212 columns wide
Your Semantic Layer is a Crime Scene I opened the file the way you'd duck under a strip of police tape and within about thirty seconds, I knew I'd stumbled onto a crime scene. Three measures named Revenue, Revenue_v2, and Revenue (do not use, ask Chris). A relationship between two tables set
Nobody Asked for Your Dashboard Let me tell you about the best report I ever built. It took two weeks. The data model was clean, the logic was airtight, and the layout — I'm not being modest here — was genuinely beautiful. Drill-throughs that actually worked. A summary page that told the whole story
Featured Welcome to Peanut Butter Intelligence! You know that feeling... It arrives in that meeting where leadership presents a new dashboard concept – beautifully designed, carefully considered, and completely disconnected from reality. At some point after the 3rd slide, you stop listening and the quiet dread settles in. You know what they don't: that the
I Kicked My Analysts Out of the Data Warehouse (… And Why it Benefits Analysts!) (originally published in 2025) Last month, we made the decision to kick our analysts out of the data warehouse. I believe this is the best thing we could have done to empower both our organization and our analysts to be successful. Without this change, we open ourselves to data trust
The Death of Excel (and other false gods) (originally published in 2022) It all started with good intentions. An early child of Gen-X computer software developers, Microsoft Multiplan was born into a free-range 1980s household, in response to Lotus 1–2–3. The proliferation that followed was strongly tied to the methodical take-over of Microsoft
