So you got a business intelligence system. It’s gonna be great! No more frustrating meetings where you spend half an hour wrangling over whose sales number is right! One source of truth, pure and simple! Suckerrrrr. Like Oscar Wilde said, the truth is never pure and rarely simple.

For instance, your BI system will have selectable date ranges – Harry will pick Monday through Sunday, Sally will opt for Sunday through Saturday, and they’ll both label it as “last week” on their slides. And then, there’s the problem of departmental myopia.

The data:

The Simple Question: How many widgets did we sell last week?

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE TEAM

Ten. You put ‘WDGT’ in the prompt box. There’s ten of those. Where did the other two go? I don’t know, but feel free to put in a ticket and we’ll look into it after the tomorrow’s sprint 5 release.

FINANCE

Four. The ones with the MarginBuster promo are zero margin, so they aren’t really sales. Damn those Marketing guys…

MARKETING

Eight. Our MarginBuster promo code brought in eight sales. Gotta run, getting my chest waxed this afternoon.

WEB ANALYTICS

Three. WebTrends says three. Offline sales? Uh, geez, I seem to have left my abacus at home, bro. No taggie, no countie.

OPERATIONS

Eleven. One canceled. Sales guaranteed him the widget would get him first position on Google for the term “cool”.

FULFILLMENT

Four. We don’t count the load if it ain’t in their abode. If it ain’t come to fruition, you don’t get your commission. If it ain’t off the truck, it’s not worth a…well, we don’t count it yet.

SALES

Twelve. Gimme my bonus.