Enterprises pour billions into data lakehouses. So why can't the business use the damn things?

Ask a business analyst how they get data from their company's lakehouse and the answer is often the same: they file a request, they wait, and somewhere between days and weeks later, they get something back that may or may not answer the question they originally asked. It is a process that would be familiar to anyone who worked in enterprise reporting 20 years ago – which is exactly the problem.

The enterprise data landscape has undergone a significant consolidation over the past several years. Organizations have invested heavily in cloud data platforms – Snowflake, Databricks, Google BigQuery – creating centralized lakehouses designed to bring structure, governance and analytical power to vast volumes of data. On paper, the architecture makes sense. On the ground, many organizations are still struggling to get value from it.

The people who need the data most – the business analysts, the finance teams, the operational leaders making day-to-day ...