Business Intelligence

Business intelligence people can actually trust

Business intelligence is supposed to give everyone the same answer to the same question. In practice, many companies have a revenue number from finance, another from sales and a third from the CRM, and the weekly meeting turns into a reconciliation exercise.

This section is about the parts of BI that create trust: semantic models, shared definitions, governed data sources, refresh schedules and report ownership. We cover tools like Power BI when a feature change affects how teams report, but we're more interested in the decisions behind the tool. Who owns a metric? What happens when a definition changes? How do you retire a report nobody reads?

Coming up here: getting started with business intelligence when your team still lives in spreadsheets, and beginner advice we wish more BI projects followed.