[morkalork]

On the other hand, Bob keeps asking for a self-serve reporting tool but in my experience, he doesn't actually want to use it. We went the route of putting all the data into a lake and hooking up GUI reporting tools to it and what did we get? Bob doesn't understand this or that column, Bob made a report that is fundamentally flawed, Bob sent a request for the engineers to make him a report using the tool and so on. Bob wanted something, or someone else, to do the work for him. When it became apparent that the tool isn't magic and can neither read minds nor divinate the true meaning of data in the DB, it became the engineer's problem again. So why not let engineers use the tools they prefer?

[hermitcrab]

>On the other hand, Bob keeps asking for a self-serve reporting tool but in my experience, he doesn't actually want to use it.

Bob can't have it both ways. ;0)

>So why not let engineers use the tools they prefer?

Empowering end-users shouldn't mean forcing engineers to use the same tools, against their will.