Comment by conductr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by conductr | Hacker News Reader

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I work closely on BI projects but from a finance perspective. The concept I like to explain to the BI teams is that the dashboard is always just a snapshot of “what” is happening. But the underlying base level data is always needed to understand “why” it’s happening. And without the why, there’s no actual intelligence gain.

Take a metric like Average Order Value (AOV). It may be ; total sales / order quantity. But as that metric is used it’s often being compared to something like last year, last month, or a plan and anyone interested in that number is really interested in understanding the “why” it has changed from some other point in time/scenario.

For that, you actually need to bring in line item details behind orders as each order has multiple products/skus and they likely sold at different prices from a year ago or what was expected in a plan. An analysis of this has a name, price-volume-mix analysis or PVM.

I always seem to have to explain this to BI teams when I join a new company and am seeking data. I’m currently going through it with a BI team, that apparently the BI tool wouldn’t store this information. It’s like it only stores aggregate values so it’s not even possible to get base level data for analysis (without major architectural changes). I don’t know if that’s normal in BI or was an implementation decision at some point but I’ve come across this same thing on a handful of companies and as I said I really have to drive this concept for those teams. When I ask of it I’m usually met with a “why would you need that info / give us a use case”. Which means, the don’t even understand how un-intelligent their BI tool is or why the execs likely aren’t feeling like investing in BI has been worthwhile (eg. Ever build a dashboard that then goes unused? I probably wasn’t perceived as useful for some reason like this).

This could be more concise put as, understanding your end users needs. Understand the difference of what people ask for is often different than what they need. If they ask for AOV metrics, they’re really saying “I need to understand AOV” and that’s done via PVM analysis.

Similarly titled towards finance. I specialize in what I'll call decision analytics for insurance underwriters.

> Which means, the don’t even understand how un-intelligent their BI tool is or why the execs likely aren’t feeling like investing in BI has been worthwhile

And this relates to what I was thinking about in my first comment. I once was conversing the COO of my company (my last job), at a 1000+ person company, and asked him if he thought more concise requests for things would drive productivity. He, point blank, said: "sometimes I don't even know what I'm asking for"

I've remembered that moment for years. In so many situations, the actual BI/dashboard is the least important part of the puzzle. Instead it's all of the conversation and discovery to understand the real need(s)

> He, point blank, said: "sometimes I don't even know what I'm asking for"

Totally relate to that AND I'm often on the receiving end of those questions in a live setting (eg. board/exec meetings). Funny to stumble on this because just last week I told someone on our BI team, there is not any one "use case" I can lay out. The use case is this, assume I need to answer any random question that comes up. I need analytical enablement not a fancy dashboard in most instances. It's not to say dashboards don't have their place, but they're just the easily digestible summary of underlying data that's meant to highlight areas and raise those questions about "why..."

Oh thank you guys! I came to this post with the thinking of "dashboards are hard to build and when they exist it's hard to extend them". My boss is asking me from time to time to add yet another dashboard to grafana and all I can do is add another piece of specific inner working values because lack of traces - the "what" part. Up until now if was as if a car driver is asking for the average air volume intake yet in really he probably needs the "why" the air volume changes. The "probably" part is important here: if the driver is the test-driver then he needs the actual value, the what; is the driver the track performance guy he needs the why; and sometimes they need booth values because they feel more secure with more information. You guys just opened my eyes, thank you!

That’s a fantastic point. The unstated underlying request isn’t to see the same chart, the same way, every week/month/quarter. It’s actually: “Find any abnormalities in the data that could be threats or opportunities, and show me THAT — in a chart, table, email, or whatever medium make makes sense.”

Yes and to say it another way it’s often “tell me the story of something I don’t already know”

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