[clusterhacks]

"Business users often ask for things without an ounce of rationale."

Deserves extra upvotes just for this statement.

This has always been painful to me working in the data analysis and reporting space. When I get many requests for dashboards or reports that lack an answer to the question of "how will this be used?", I seem to find the requesting groups are cost-centers in the larger organization and are somewhat obsessed with processes and procedures.

This is rarely a good group to build a career with . . .

[proamdev123]

As a business user myself, often times we are simply responding to an edict from Leadership that amounts to: “You guys should have some dashboards!”

Other times it’s because a supervisor or internal customer likes to see certain things on a chart, and putting the chart in Power BI/Tableau/other tool will make them prettier than Excel charts.

Very few people, starting from the top on down, have a good understanding that dashboards mean very little in and of themselves.