Must watch: Mico Yuk on BI storyboards

Recently I watched a video by Mico Yuk where she explains her approach to BI storyboarding. Mico Yuk is well-known in the BI space specifically around SAP and Lumira. She runs her own consultancy predominantly helping SAP customers build out BI projects for their own internal use cases.

In this video, she talks with such passion about the BI space and clearly understands the process to ensure the success of a project. In particular, she focuses on storyboarding – thinking about what people want to deliver and how they want to deliver it. Proper storyboards are  persona-based and require you to think about your audience and use cases before actually starting to build the technology.

In a really simple and concise way, Mico describes how to identify the pain points of a business.  She focuses on what users are really looking for. For example, one of the key things that she highlights is why it’s important to talk to the business in terms of their needs rather than the technology solutions. It’s always worth restating that business users don’t care about technology for its own sake – they care about having better information to allow them to do their job.

The video was published in 2013 but proves that the fundamentals don’t change in this space. Everything she says is still super-relevant in terms of how people should approach building out and delivering BI projects to their audience. Her methodologies for dashboards and the analysis that a business needs to get their job done are well defined and articulated.

While the technology may have changed slightly, the fundamentals of delivering analytics have not. What Mico covers is just as relevant today as it was five years ago.

I’d recommend anyone embarking on a BI project to watch this clip. It will help you think about the lifecycle of delivering a BI project and how you should engage with your audience. It’s a fantastic piece, that’s why I’ve also sent it out internally to our consultants. You can check it out here