This is symptomatic of a larger problem: vendors and executives confuse analytics with reporting. Sometimes they flop the terms. Other times, such as these, they overlap the terms. This creates the highest hope in business and the greatest letdown.

Executives want data-driven ideas on where to go next. Technology can only go so far. But, if you find someone who executes well between technology and business, who understands the ideas, who can look for problems, then executives find what they were looking for.

It takes a philosophical shift – analytics is not a technology solution. It’s a human solution that uses technology.

While some of the claims are certainly more egregious than others, they all suffer from the same underlying insinuation. That is; with their product, analytical and design skills aren’t needed.

Yes, it may indeed be true that anyone (at least those with basic computer skills) might be able to use their software, but that isn’t the message that’s being sent. Being able to operate a piece of software does not equate to being able create effective visualizations.

Vendors that lead the market to believe otherwise are doing themselves and their potential clients a disservice by setting expectations that the products (by themselves) will fail to deliver on.

Software is nothing more than a tool, and often a tool we find lacking. It is up to us to pick the right tool for the right job and then provide the right skill set in order to use the tool to a positive end.

“When the only tool you possess is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail.”

Is it possible for a BI Application to provide a tool-set to visualise and also teach data sense making?

Steve,

Recently, I’ve come across a few posts by Avinash Kaushik (http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/). And he commonly uses the expression “data puker” to refer to a person responsible for analyzing data, without real data analysis skills. Thus, she’s unable to garner real insights.

So I was wondering: is it possible that those marketing claims are not really exaggerated, in the sense that they target “data pukers”?

There is a need for a simple answer to be delivered to someone easily. I have built a solution with a ‘modern’ product to enable a user to answer their own simple questions to the tune of “How many $s did we get from product X during Y timeframe through channel Z”. After building such a solution the user’s questions dropped off and now his questions are starting to change to “why” and “how can we change”.

As pointed out previously, this is ‘reporting’ and not ‘analysis’ and there have been many previous products that did the same thing in different ways (Cognos, Crystal Reports, and Business Objects). Considering vendors are still hawking this ‘new’ feature of self-service seems to indicate we haven’t move very far in 15+ years.

Literacy rates didn’t rise until several centuries after the printing press was made.

@Qlik “…no need for developers, data scientists or designers.”

Except for the highly-paid contractors that work for you, right? I mean, if we had our own experts, we wouldn’t need expensive support licenses, would we?

Stephen I feel I do have to agree with the vendors on one point here: Many suggest that you don’t need analytical skills to be able to use their products – they’re not wrong. It’s just that the part they don’t tell you is that if you DO have analytical skills, you WON’T be able to use their products.

At least that has been my experience.

@Stephen,

Indeed – my implication was that many of these tools can’t be used productively. I realize that’s not a completely fair or accurate suggestion, as is typically the case with hyperbole.

But the point I was making with it is serious: When the BI tools are designed to be used by non-analysts (i.e. everyone), the analysts are the ones who struggle to use the software effectively (due to design limitations, or bad default settings, or sometimes just the software wrestling the data sense-making task from the analyst’s far-more-capable hands).

Love the free Tableau marketing… I mean “training” videos. I lost count of the number of times I heard the words, “simple”, “simply”, “easy” or “easily” in the videos. It’s been my experience that these “simple” tools require a fair amount of data prep before you can ever drag and drop to get any insight.

I’m with you on this one, I have yet to see the tool that anyone in the organization can use to reach meaningful and accurate conclusions without training and lots of practice.

How about this :
“If we construct a pyramid of user skills in most organizations, it probably would look something like the one shown below, and you can see that the non-technical users dominate the spectrum of users. Despite these large number of non-technical users today, much of the industry still focuses on developing tools for those skilled in the art of analysis. InfoApps break that trend as they deliver informational applications to users on their terms, without needing any education of analytical tools.”
http://www.informationbuilders.com/products/webfocus/infoapps
The whole page linked above makes outrageous claims about the software being able to deliver answers and insights to anyone.
There is a subtle play on words between being skilled at the art of analysis and needing an education in analytical tools, a shift from being skilled at data analysis to being skilled at using software. However, those are quite clearly two different skills.
Vendors actually are making efforts, as seen above, to increase the confusion between the two. Of course, magical software that can deliver answers is more likely to sell, so you can abdicate your thinking and let the software also do this part for you.

The next step, of course, is to create software that grants you world domination, without you even having to think up a plan in order to achieve it.