Analytics & BI
Self-serve analytics, decision intelligence, and BI program maturity.
13 articles
Airbus lost a quarter to misaligned revenue metrics: here is the playbook that prevents it
When finance, sales, and product each calculate "revenue" differently, the damage shows up in board decks, budget fights, and delayed decisions. This playbook walks CDOs through building a semantic layer that makes metric definitions a shared organizational fact, not a tribal negotiation.
Sep 21, 2026DuckDB just made the analyst's job description obsolete, here is what CDOs should do about it
Natural-language BI is collapsing the distance between a business question and a working query. CDOs who treat this as a tooling upgrade rather than a workforce redesign will find themselves managing a team built for problems that no longer exist.
Sep 11, 2026Decision intelligence and embedded analytics: making the decision the unit of design
Most organisations already have dashboards. What they lack is a way to get data into the moment a decision is actually made. Decision intelligence reframes the problem by treating the decision itself as the thing you engineer around.
Aug 28, 2026Data observability: catching bad data before it reaches decisions
Bad data doesn't announce itself. This playbook shows CDOs how to build detection mechanisms that intercept data quality failures before they corrupt reports, models, and the decisions that follow.
Aug 22, 2026Natural-language BI and the analyst's new role: why the "democratisation" story is only half true
Natural-language query tools promise to put business intelligence in everyone's hands, removing the analyst bottleneck. The reality is more complicated, and CDOs who act on the simple version of this story will make costly structural mistakes.
Aug 11, 2026How Airbnb rebuilt metric consistency with a semantic layer
Airbnb's analytics teams were producing conflicting numbers for the same business questions, undermining trust in data across the company. Their response, building Minerva, a centralised semantic layer, offers a precise and transferable blueprint for CDOs dealing with the same problem.
Aug 1, 2026Building a semantic layer for consistent metrics across business units
When Finance reports one revenue number and Sales reports another, the problem is rarely the data itself. This playbook shows CDOs how to build a semantic layer that enforces metric consistency across every business unit, without requiring a full data warehouse overhaul.
Jul 17, 2026Self-service analytics is failing most organizations, and CDOs are partly to blame
Most self-service analytics programs deliver far less than promised, with adoption stalling and shadow IT filling the gaps. The problem is rarely the technology.
Jul 10, 2026Self-service analytics at scale: what CDOs keep getting wrong
Most organizations have deployed self-service BI tools. Far fewer have made them work. Here is what separates the ones that do.
Jul 3, 2026When BI becomes a liability: how CDOs are rethinking the analytics stack in 2026
Most organizations are sitting on analytics infrastructure that costs more to maintain than it delivers in decisions. CDOs who recognize this are already rebuilding around a leaner, faster, and more accountable model.
Jun 26, 2026From dashboards to decisions: why most BI programs still fail to move the needle
Most organizations have invested heavily in business intelligence infrastructure, yet a striking number of decisions are still made on gut instinct rather than data. For CDOs, the real challenge in 2026 is no longer building analytics capability; it's engineering the conditions under which insights actually change behavior.
Jun 18, 2026Beyond dashboards: why most BI programs fail to deliver strategic value, and what CDOs must do differently
Organizations spend millions on business intelligence infrastructure, yet fewer than 30% of analytics initiatives measurably influence executive decision-making. The gap between data availability and data-driven culture is not a technology problem, it's a leadership problem that sits squarely on the CDO's desk.
Jun 11, 2026From dashboards to decisions: why most BI programs fail to deliver business value
Organizations collectively spend billions on analytics infrastructure, yet fewer than 30% of business decisions are actually informed by data. The gap between BI investment and business impact is not a technology problem, it's a strategy problem that falls squarely on the CDO's desk.