The Analytics Power Hour #276: BI is Dead! Long Live BI! With Colin Zima
Jul 22, 2025
Colin Zima, CEO of Omni and former chief analytics officer at Looker, dives into the evolving landscape of business intelligence. He shares insights on the challenges product managers face in creating user-friendly BI tools for everyone from executives to data scientists. The conversation touches on the complexities of balancing self-service access with control, the integration of AI, and the importance of effective data visualization. Zima emphasizes the need for clear communication between data and business teams to maximize the impact of analytics.
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BI Tools Serve Diverse Users
- Building a BI tool is difficult because it must serve a wide spectrum of users with vastly different needs.
- Balancing between executives needing clean dashboards and analysts needing deep analysis creates inherent challenges.
Excel as the BI Fallback
- BI tools often mix Excel-like interfaces with SQL backends, creating confusing hybrid languages.
- Excel remains the fallback because users understand it better than most BI tool languages.
Data Team vs Business Disconnect
- Colin once asked a data team for actionable insights after a pricing analysis.
- They sent lots of charts but no recommendations, showing a disconnect in communication.
