PowerBI Is a Human Rights Violation

I am extremely aware of a very big commodity trader that is currently in the process of using PowerBI in order to set up better middle office(read: risk management + post trade) processes for a trading desk. As one can imagine(my experience matches the article), this integration is going swimmingly.

The entire reason for using PowerBI is that any non-tech company does not want to hire programmers as they are expensive and a traditional line manager probably can't evaluate the deliverables.I've been in multiple organisations where "This would be faster with Python + X rather than Excel, for safety we can run it by the IT department" was met with "I don't know Python and IT department 's job is not to supervise what you write".

With Excel + PowerBI, any line manager gets the illusion that he can judge the quality of the dashboards as they probably know some Excel formulas and can get the PowerBI knowledge by looking up a few videos on Youtube. The worst case scenario, i.e shit breaking horribly, is also solvable since any external Excel consultancy also offers PowerBI services.

> PowerBI makes me want to PowerDIE, is a profound offense to whatever nobility is inherent to the human spirit, and anyone asking for one of these fucking things to be produced should be treated - pending the greatest justification the world has ever seen - like they have stopped the meeting to take a piss on everyone's shoes.

Well said.

Speaking more broadly when it comes to corporate metrics in general... I think sometimes the real goal of those stakeholders is the ability to assert to someone else that, the company generates Report X, even if the report has no charts/conclusions they are interested in looking at.

> No one reads them. It's just some stupid long-tailed distribution where three of these absolutely useless fucking things gets read a few times a day (by someone that probably doesn't do anything with the information) and the rest of them don't get read at all.

My first job out of college was on a cargo logistics team where we were tracking multiple pieces of very, very expensive cargo that had to be packed in a certain way while in transit to their destination (which rhymes with "Blinternational Blace Blation"). The job wasn't terribly difficult; our node in the planning chain was a database with about 80,000 records with maybe 110 properties per record, and most were managed by the system. We were actively tracking 5-8000 at any given time.

There were tons of issues in the overall cargo logistics process, because at each "node" in the process, no one (hardware owners, hardware coordinators, packing technicians) really cared about data sanitation. This was my first job, so as I researched the root causes of problems I'd find core design deficiencies, like "Desired Shipment" being a free-text entry field instead of a pick list, or "[Status] = Approved" meaning one thing to one group and a different thing to a different group.

Eventually, I'd grown so competent that I had a list of about 45 checks to do on any individual record, and I was using Power Query to create automatic reports on how many records per shipment were corrupted, incomplete, or otherwise likely to cause issues. I'd get hauled in to various large working forums to explain why processing was taking too long on some $10M microscope and I'd pull out my dashboard and reports to show that the hardware owner hadn't entered in dimensions or mass yet, and that there were 17 more records that had the same deficiency, yadda yadda yadda.

No one ever really did anything with all the work I put together, and every time we suggested something some division would have an elaborate explanation for why they wouldn't possibly sanitize their data or provide it earlier in the process. Last I heard they're paying millions of dollars per year to develop an end-to-end platform to do exactly the same thing I was doing (query multiple databases, compare records, spit out lists of incomplete records). I doubt that expensive database-reading tool will fix the problem either, because it's not even just that "no one reads the reports"; in addition to not reading the reports, they don't know what to do with the insight.

My experience with how corporations use data indicates capitalism is one giant sunk cost fallacy.