[eitally]

This is it, really. I remember back during a previous section of my career when I was running BI for a manufacturing company. We were asked to web-ify some legacy reports that either ran on desktops using Access & Excel or were on older BI products (Cognos). It was shocking -- at the time (I was naive) -- how many business requirements were essentially "replicate Excel in a browser", and completely divorced from the actual business processes and decisions that needed to be made.

Also, it might surprise a lot of less experienced developers just how many reporting tools are actually pieces of a workflow, not just reports. If you sniff this out during the requirements phase, do your best to convert these reports into features of an actual workflow app/system rather than allow them to persist as standalone reports.

[itsoktocry]

>either ran on desktops using Access & Excel or were on older BI products (Cognos). It was shocking -- at the time (I was naive)

I think some people have a skewed view if they do most of their work with VC funded/SV companies. The average person at these companies is way more data savvy than average.

But there are so many companies out there that make a ton of money and have data-unsophisticated-but-domain-wise users, and old systems. Low hanging fruit.