| Tons of great advice in the comments. At risk of repeating others, here's what I've learned working on business intelligence tools for an engineering group: - What users ask for and what users really want are often extremely different. - Engineering executives like to place their "thumbprint" on every business analytics dashboard. They want evidence that the "intelligence" being reported has been customized by them. It's their way of imparting branding on the organization. - UI/UX is far more important to users than how you handle the technical details. When discussing implementation with them, start with the UI so that they have a mental model to build from. - Leave space to create cool things that you/your team want to make. The developers of BI dashboards often have excellent ideas for visualizing data that an end-user would not immediately think of. Leave room to "delight". - Never assume the data is clean or accurate (even when there are regulatory reasons for it to be either of those things) - Not everyone's opinion is equally valuable. - Beware of corporate politics. I once had an analytics project completely shut down because it would expose certain weaknesses in the business that were not acceptable to discuss publicly. Bonus: Read "Envisioning Information" by Edward Tufte. |