They asked me to develop a BI solution for a mid sized health care organization. To be more specific: they (the management of the organization) asked me to implement a dashboard (with all those fancy traffic lights, gauges and graphs).

It turned out that cleansing and combining the data from three different sources (without any master data management) was already quite a challenge. Dealing with invalid measures and references, badly formatted names and reuse of existing codes in such a way that it could be maintained by their own IT department was a very time consuming preparation phase so easily overlooked by those managers. By now we are ready to put some useful data into a cube that might replace some spreadsheets that are still filled by hand every month by some financial guru.

We have asked them to specify what they want to see on their dashboard. Of coarse they know what they want to see: productivity, costs, number of clients, the usual stuff. We decided now is the time to ask them what they want to see exactly, where, how and about whom, to specify limits for the traffic lights, ranges for the gauges. As you might have expected, they wonder why we can't figure that out, because most of them do not even have the slightest idea.

Getting clean data gets you only halfway. By the time you have managed to keep the garbage out of your BI solution, you know more about the sources than you ever wanted to know, and probably even more than most of their own DBA's. And then the managers expect you to tell them what they actualy want to see on their dashboards. Good luck!