People want to see the data before they accept it

Recently, I posited that people don't need more tools to create charts. If I come off as cynical of BI tools, that's not my intention. I enjoy working in BI. I take a lot of satisfaction building solutions that help drive business improvement, and these BI tools help me do that.

When I look at a line chart I made, I have the advantage of knowing all about the data behind it. My worldview of the data is not limited to a few spreadsheets handed to me. I often conduct my exploratory work from a database, which gives me access to all the possibilities. I've matched the data up to the application. I know of those important and less important timestamps that mark the intake funnel. I found that table that tracks the history of all the previous promotions. I have the full context surrounding the chart.

Your typical BI consumer just sees the few points on the chart. That might be all they need, but they don't gain an inherent acceptance of the data behind it because they can't easily see what I can. This behavior is clear when so often your carefully crafted charts become a means to export the data to Excel. Most BI tools don't make peeking at the underlying data very intuitive, if even possible. It can be done sometimes, but often relies on us BI folks setting up some maintenance heavy configurations (which are still limited to whatever we decided to include).

BI tools need to make seeing the data behind the charts a more consumer friendly experience by default.