I’ve come to a similar conclusion about “self-service BI” myself but my solution is somewhat different. The solution I have is move the layer of abstraction higher: make extremely customizable dashboards but do not expose SQL to business users.
An example of this might be a dashboard with 20 filters and 20 parameters controlling breakdown dimensions and “assumptions used.” So asking “how did Google ads perform in the last month broken down by age group” is about changing 3-4 preset dropdowns. Parameters are also key here - this way you only expose the knobs that you’ve vetted - not arbitrary SQL.
Obviously this is a hard dashboard to build and requires quite a bit of viz expertise (eg experience with looker or tableau or excel) but the result is 70% of questions do become self service. The other 30% - abandon hope. You will need someone to translate business questions into data questions and that’s a human problem.
Yes, know which questions gets asked often and make those dashboards. Now the cfo or whoever can just open those dashboards when they want answers to those questions for any given timeframe.
my experience both as a builder, and as part of people that have to sit in the C-suit is the person then comes with their ill-understanding of the data and try to convince everyone A is B when it isn't
An example of this might be a dashboard with 20 filters and 20 parameters controlling breakdown dimensions and “assumptions used.” So asking “how did Google ads perform in the last month broken down by age group” is about changing 3-4 preset dropdowns. Parameters are also key here - this way you only expose the knobs that you’ve vetted - not arbitrary SQL.
Obviously this is a hard dashboard to build and requires quite a bit of viz expertise (eg experience with looker or tableau or excel) but the result is 70% of questions do become self service. The other 30% - abandon hope. You will need someone to translate business questions into data questions and that’s a human problem.