Thanks for chiming in, great post, I like the premise - I just think we must have completely different working experiences. I'm typically in a larger org that has multiple systems feeding data into a data lake or something similar that has been normalized but also can still usually has some quirks. Articulating the right request to BI is certainly a skill, but my approach/experience is that I try to paint the picture of the end goal and let them fill in the gaps as needed. Sometimes that's literally drawing out a graph or chart that I want to exist.

Even when no BI team is dedicated, there's usually someone that's wearing that hat. Someone setup those schemas and data pipelines, etc or is responsible for maintaining them. That person is probably the one that knows "make sure you exclude the NULL items" or something similar.

I do like being in touch with changing data trends from a leadership perspective. It's either real and could be a valuable insight or it's a bug that needs to be addressed before any ill advised decisions are made from the 'info'. I find this can often be setup proactively and put into a dashboard. In that way, identifying it and raising concern can be 'my job' but when investigating it, it could be a team effort.