Welcome to "The Spreadsheet Advisor" – a blog that guides business people (and other "non-IT" professionals) in the use of Business Intelligence (BI) and shows them how to maximize the business value.
My name is Jakob J. Hansen and I have worked as a Business Intelligence Specialist for the past 16 years, advising national and international companies on BI strategies, planning, and implementation.
I have an MSc in Economics. In other words, I am not an IT-technician, but I work with BI from a business developing and supporting point of view.
Many people and organizations consider BI as an IT discipline. This is partly true.
However, this viewpoint is also one of the greatest mistakes you can make when you want your BI to be a success. The greatest challenge and by far the most difficult one is making a "roadmap" for how BI should be used throughout the organization.
The purpose of this blog is to guide business professionals in the use of BI from a BUSINESS perspective. In other words, I will discuss subjects, strategies, guidelines, and how-to through the eyes and mindset of the controller, business analyst or manager.
Why "The Spreadsheet Advisor" you may ask?
In my 16 years of practice, I have developed analytical tools, reports, cubes, Dashboards, presentations, and courses in almost every BI tool on the planet. No matter how fine, fancy and usable the final result has been, when the "great day" arrives and the solutions are presented for the stakeholders, the response has in most cases been this: " This is a great solution, we love it…..now, how do we get it in Excel?"
In other words, my experience tells me that the vast majority of business professionals, who make everyday decisions based on data, uses spreadsheets as their primary analytical tool. Hence, I will use spreadsheets for my presentations in order to make the knowledge sharing as "smooth" as possible.
"Technology is the easy part. Computers are predictable. It is the people that are the challenge. Don’t underestimate the effect of change on the human element".
- John Boyer
I hope you will find my blog enjoyable and enlightening.
Best Regards
Jakob J. Hansen