I've worked in many analytics projects across a number of companies as a consultant. I'm a big believer in "decision support systems". Find out what decisions your customers need to make, repeatedly, to their job. Quantify the heuristics and visualize that information (and that information only) in an easy to consume manner. More often than not that's an email or PDF. Another advantage is that by supporting the business users they feel less threatened by the changes or technology.

I think "self-serve" analytics is silly, the idea that you put all of the data in front of people and they'll derive "insights". That's not how normal people or data work. We just had a discussion on HN the other day about Facebook's Prophet, and its pitfalls. Meanwhile we expect Joe in sales to be able to identify useful trends on a chart he made. Every company needs to forecast, regardless of their sophistication. That stuff needs to be defined by the right people and given to the users.

I helped build the analytics group at a PE fund, and this really fits with my experience.

Good decision support is where most of the value is, and it’s about building things that draw conclusions, not just throwing the data over the fence with 50 filters and expecting the end consumer to do the actual analysis.

I now work on an open source, code-based BI tool called Evidence, which incorporates a lot of these ideas, and might be of interest to people in this thread.

https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence

Previous discussions on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28304781 - 91 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35645464 - 97 comments