A while ago, one of my clients was approached by an old colleague who now sells software. Specifically, BI or business intelligence software. It seems to be one of a raft of products aimed at SMEs and purported to help owners make sense of data. The salespeople (or avatars) usually refer to this as “big data”, whether it is or not. They do this while demonstrating lots of brightly-coloured graphs, each of which can be rotated, sliced and diced, drilled into, overlaid, reformatted…a salesperson’s dream. The business owner watches with glazed eyes – here, surely, is a cure to all those productivity problems and quality problems and control problems. It is of course much simpler nowadays to find, extract, link and manipulate data from an organisations’s computer systems. Most cloud-based systems will have an application programming interface (API) that allows data to be extracted. Even clunky old systems like Sage (still used by many small businesses) have this sort of facility. However, ...