The progress of user requests

Almost two years ago I have written a rant about customers asking to build Business Intelligence solutions that deliver only data extracts in tables, not being able to think further etc etc etc... (By the way, reading it one more time today made me smile at how upset I was at the time... She was a tough nut to crack!) Recently Anonymous (sorry, don't know your name...) posted a very insightful comment on that blog post and got me thinking on how the customers have progressed throughout the two years.

And it actually is a positive development. With a little help, surely.



The three points suggested by Anonymous, guiding through the process of creating reports, are valid, but they do not tackle the main issue- user is not able to think in the aggregated, information-generating terms. They are sincerely unaware of the fact that they will be doing the same thing with the data dump every week/month maybe even day (yes yes, I am aware of the generalization here; not everyone; not 100%). The extreme cases, like the one that made me whine two years ago, would not even listen to what you have to say. Sounds familiar?

What I learned, however, is that coming back a couple of months after data dump delivery makes it much easier to talk about the final result. At this point you have a very specific set of information that has been compiled by the customer during the time your solution has been live. Take all of the final reports the user has sent out to management and use those as the starting point of your discussion (re-discussion, maybe). Customers are truly amazed when you tell them  that you can do all of this copy-paste and vlookup action for them, even though the concept was so hard to grasp two months ago, now it will all look so obvious to them. They might even be grateful too! The creative thinkers tend to go even further and create new things when having these post-go-live discussions.

And the most pleasant thing within these past two years? The tough nut that wanted the data dump. During a new project start up she actually said:
'Why can't the computer do this for me? If I can do this in excel every month, I am sure you can do it too!'

Thus my version of tactics to guide the BI customer:

1. Give them the so desired data. Get the ball rolling, so to say;
2. Come back after some period of time and talk to them, see what they are doing with the data you provide;
3. Deliver the results of No 2 discussions to them with that ever tools can do the job best.

Maybe this new Microsoft BI strategy of allowing the users to share their reports on Sharepoint is not that bad. Especially if you get the time to monitor their usage closely and then follow up by producing professional reports off those excel templates. Maybe it will let the users educate us too. Maybe. Just hope it will not create chaos...

Keep fighting!
M.