Board Games
You are throwing a party. A board game event for you a group of your best friends.
On the invite, you say “Bring along your favorite board game or two”
The night arrives and your friends begWin to show up.
The first friend, Joseph, arrives with aW board game under his arm. He heads straight for the living room coffee table and begins to set up the game.
Heather shows up next and she quickly pulls out a board game and sets it up on the kitchen table.
Finally, Carlton arrives (he’s always a bit late). He also has a game under his arm and he marches straight to the dining room and sets up his game.
Initially, you are thrilled about the evening ahead. Three of your best friends are here and they brought some of their favorite games to play. It’ll be a great evening.
Then you notice Joseph is sitting at the coffee table neatly adjusting pieces of his game, Heather hasn’t said hi to anyone but is very intently organizing cards for her game in the kitchen. And Carlton (despite his late start) has his game entirely set up and is waiting patiently for someone to join him.
You wander around and individually ask your friend about what’s going on. They each express excitement about their game, insisting it’s an excellent choice for the evening, and are confident that the others will love it.
So they each sit there, with an excellent game in front of them, but no one to play with.
Business teams do this with data tools all the time.
Each business org has a favorite data visualization and business intelligence tool. Marketing uses Tableau. Operations uses Power BI. A finance manager loves Qlik. There are a few people on Looker in the Sales Analytics team.
They each express excitement about their BI, insisting it’s a great choice for the company, and are confident that the others will love it if they give it a try. But no one wants to give up their favorite tool.
And so they all sit there, with an excellent tool in front of them, hoping - dreaming - of collaborating across divisions and sharing analytics. All while remaining quite comfortable in their BI tool silo.
I’m here,
Sawyer
p.s. Most data problems aren’t data problems. They are people and culture problems. Which is a problem Chat-GPT-n won’t be able to fix anytime soon.
