![]() ![]() ![]() I think this is the most important ongoing challange in business intelligence (despite how cool "big data" is at the moment). I think we can do better without throwing user empowerment completely out the window or spending big money to get a simple report. I suppose its as much or more of a company culture and procedural issue than it is a tooling issue but the tools we make are responsible in some part. The late Jobs has long been heralded as a genius for the way he. I just think there can be better solutions between "user is totally at the mercy of n thousand $/hr report writing consultants" and "user is forced to code their own disconnected data system without a net." In that situation I'd probably be recommending option #2 as well but with a please KISS warning.Įvery time I read about a company making a big public mistake because they made an error in a user developed shadow system it breaks my heart a little. After all, he co-founded Apple with one of the tech world’s greatest communicators and marketers of all time: Steve Jobs. I sympathize with people whose choice is between building a shadow system and having to deal with a Oracle's billing department (shudder). This disconnection bears similar risks as a developer who goes for months without checking in code only to drop their masterpiece in on code cut day and inevitably shoot everyone in the foot. as long as they're simple its manageable but they get complex quickly with no control and no record of how they got the data to a given state. Generally speaking I consider numbers out of these systems suspect until I understand how they work. They also lack an audit trail which enables all sorts of I'll advised and sometimes unethical number fudging. The confusion stems, I think, from the fact that Jobs's' product announcements used presentation graphics, presumably using Apple's own product Keynote. The danger of access (and excel) IMO is they encourage users who don't regularly build software to create complex systems without good tools to test and verify what they're doing and in a totally disconnected fashion. ![]() You can create beautiful presentations with it but it leads you in the wrong direction from the start. PowerPoint for instance guides users right into bullet point hell. That said I've had to unscrew a number of spaghetti coded access based shadow systems of the "why are you running your business on this!?" type in the past and I do think these tools are to an extent responsible for leading users into the wrong paths. Also perhaps I'm blaming the paintbrush when I should also be blaming the painter which is going on regarding PowerPoint in this thread. Forstall was never bad, but he carried a certain smugness. To be fair its been years since I've touched access so maybe its much better now than it was. The former Apple executive used to be a keynote staple, serving as Jobs’ 2 presenter in the years following the launch of the iPhone. ![]()
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