We’ve seen the same story play out in boardrooms for nearly 20 years.
A company spends a fortune on a new Business Intelligence platform. They build slick, colourful dashboards. They roll them out with a big announcement.
Two weeks later, everyone is ignoring them.
Or, even worse, they log in, look at the pretty charts, and immediately hit the “Export to CSV” button so they can do the actual work in a spreadsheet.
If that’s happening in your business, your BI project has failed. You haven’t built a decision-making tool; you’ve just built a very expensive way to download data.
The Report Factory Trap
The problem usually starts with how the project is managed.
In many organisations, IT teams are judged on output. If the business asks for five reports, and IT delivers five reports, they think they’ve succeeded.
But that’s the wrong metric.
We often walk into companies where there are 200 reports in the system, but only four are actually viewed. The rest are digital clutter. This happens because nobody stopped to ask why the report was needed in the first place.
Effective business intelligence consulting isn’t about building what users ask for. It’s about building what they need. There’s a big difference. Users usually ask for “what we had before, but digital.” That’s a waste of time.
Pretty Doesn't Mean Useful
Modern BI tools make it very easy to create beautiful visuals. You can have maps, heat, and speedometers.
But a pretty dashboard without context is useless.
If a dial turns red, does the person looking at it know exactly what to do next? If the answer is no, then it’s just wallpaper.
We focus on exception reporting. Don’t show someone a list of 10,000 transactions that went well. Show them the five that failed. That’s how you drive efficiency. You need to strip away the noise, so people can see the signal.
The Trust Issue
The other reason people go back to Excel is trust.
If a Sales Director looks at a dashboard, and it says revenue is £500k, but their own spreadsheet says £520k, the dashboard loses. Every time.
It doesn’t matter if the dashboard is technically right and the spreadsheet is wrong. Once that doubt creeps in, adoption dies.
This is why we spend so much time on the data modelling layer before we even open the visualisation tools. You need a “Single Version of the Truth” that Finance, Sales, and Operations all agree on. If you skip that step, you’re just visualising arguments.
Stop Building Vanity Metrics
We’ve been acting as a data analytics consultancy in the UK for a long time, and our advice is always the same: start small and solve a real problem.
Don’t try to build a dashboard for the entire company at once. Find one specific pain point, like inventory forecasting or cash flow analysis, and fix it perfectly.
When you give someone a tool that actually saves them time and gives them numbers they trust, you won’t have to force them to use it. They’ll demand it.
Stop building reports that go into a black hole. Let’s build something your team actually uses.
Contact us today to get started.
