Executives love a good dashboard.

And for good reasons. A good dashboard can show where revenue is leaking, where costs are running away, where things are slowing down, or where they're breaking.

But the dashboard is just the tip of an iceberg. And the moment you're combining more than a couple of data sources, you need to have a data-warehouse conversation.

And that's not a bad thing. It just means you have a treasure of data in your company, and it's time to talk about some serious plumbing before the pretty picture.