I would be eternally grateful for any thoughts or suggestions on my situation.
I manage an analytics team working on operational reporting in large organisational setting.
The reports we produce draw from the org-wide established source of truth (an oracle DB) . The recurring issue is that a specific group of users compare the dashboard to their own local or the CRM system, which is known to be out of sync with the main DB, and then treat the mismatch as a Power BI “discrepancy.”
So the pattern is usually:
Users look at the Power BI dashboard
They compare it to their own system, tracker, extract, or local view
Their system does not match the source of truth
They assume the dashboard is wrong
We investigate
The dashboard is usually doing what it is supposed to do
The issue is that their system, extract, or local process is out of sync
The same type of query comes back again later
My team and I have gone through all the usual fixes / measures: definitions, guidance notes, training, catch-ups, trackers, “before raising an issue” checks, filter-state summaries, warning banners, comparison pages, known non-issue logs, request forms, screenshots/filter requirements, office hours, and named super-users.
The issue still persists.
This has also started causing much bigger operational problems. There have been several instances where users have relied on their own out-of-sync source rather than checking with my team or validating against the agreed source of truth, even after being told to do so. In the last four months, this has contributed to three serious formal/legal escalations that I then had to work urgently, including overnight, to help resolve. So this is no longer just an irritating reporting support issue. It is creating organisational risk because decisions are being made from unreliable local data, and the clean-up is landing with analytics after the damage is already done.
At this point, I do not think this is a dashboard UX problem. I think it is a governance and accountability problem. Users want the benefits of a single source of truth, but when the main source contradicts their local system, they default to defending the local system rather than reconciling it back to the original databse.
The difficult part is that their system is politically or operationally important to them, so challenging it can come across as challenging their process, ownership, or competence. But if Power BI is built from the actual source of truth, then every mismatch should not automatically become a reporting defect.
I’m interested in how others have handled / would handle this.
Specific questions:
- How do you deal with users who are emotionally or politically invested in their own system being “right”?
- How do you get leadership to back the principle that the report drawing from the org-wide source is the reference point, not whichever system a team happens to prefer?
I’m looking for practical governance/process approaches but equally open to any unhinged hacks