I posted something on LinkedIn this week that clearly hit a nerve:
“You spent €200K on BI. The CFO still uses Excel.”
Thousands of impressions. Dozens of messages.
One comment changed how I think about this entire problem.
A data platform engineer called it “BI empathy.”
The idea: Your CFO isn’t rejecting your BI system because it lacks features. They’re rejecting it because it doesn’t answer their actual question.
Across 1,500+ BI projects, I keep seeing the same pattern:
IT builds systems that show everything.
Execs need systems that answer one thing: “What do I do Monday morning?”
The dashboard has 47 metrics. Three drill-downs. Beautiful visualizations.
Their Excel sheet has five numbers and a decision.
The gap isn’t technical.
It’s a communication and process problem.
Here’s what’s actually happening (based on what IT leaders told me this week):
Your CFO asks for “everything” because they don’t trust they’ll get another chance with your team for months.
Your team builds comprehensive dashboards because that’s what was requested.
Your CFO can’t find their answer in the complexity, so they export to Excel.
Your team sees low adoption and gets demoralized.
The cycle repeats.
There’s a different approach.
The companies that break this cycle do three things differently:
- Start with ONE decision (not comprehensive dashboards)
Pick one executive. Ask them:
“What’s one decision you make monthly that currently requires gathering data from multiple sources?”
Build ONLY that answer. Nothing else.
Not “sales dashboard.” Not “financial overview.”
The specific answer to their specific Monday morning question.
- Build it WITH them, not FOR them
This is the “BI empathy” part.
Sit with them for 90 minutes. Show them the data logic. Let them question it. Change it together. Make it interrogable.
They need to understand WHY the number is what it is (just like they do in Excel).
When they can trace the logic, they trust it.
- Deliver it in one week (not one quarter)
One decision. One week. No month-long project.
When they see the process actually works, they come back.
Now you’ve built trust in the PROCESS, not just the dashboard.
This changes everything.
Because the problem was never “Excel vs. BI.”
It was:
“Do I trust this team to answer my actual question without a three-month project?”
One executive. One decision. One week.
Prove the process works.
Then scale it.
The teams getting traction with this approach start small:
One executive. One question. 90 minutes to build it together. One week to deliver.
Then they let the results do the talking.
