Software has come a long ways. I remember when I managed a digital agency charging clients top dollar for custom reporting platforms. Off-the-shelf solutions like Crystal Dynamics were costly and cumbersome, a combination that seems to go hand in hand with enterprise software.

Somewhere along the way, someone got tired of clumsy and cumbersome and made reporting software easier.

I started playing around with Tableau for more rapid reporting and a channel to provide public access to innovation-related data sets. There is a bit of a learning curve but some tutorials, a walk through from colleagues at the university, and an incredible tutorial session with Frederic Frey have me going in the right direction.

I am not expecting I will be an active participant in projects like Makeover Monday where each week the tableau community tries their hand at visualising a new data set. But I should get up to speed enough to get some charts out by next week and perhaps a portal for February.

Software continues to move down the path of “no code” platforms, made up of existing solutions to validate customer demand.

We will always need engineers to advance technology. But increasingly the barrier is not in the ability to create new technology. It is in knowing how to bring existing technology together to solve a problem.