India, Dec. 30 -- It started innocently enough: A request for one simple dashboard. The team delivered a masterpiece-complete with drilldowns, trend lines and a predictive model that claimed to calculate the CEO's mood. Soon, every department wanted their own version. HR added a maroon Mood Monitor. Legal wanted a chocolate-colored Compliance Chart. Logistics asked for an indigo Inventory Index. Sales sought a red Reality Response.

The result? By the next quarter, the dashboard had 14 widgets and required four servers to run. Meetings turned into interpretive art sessions: "If the blue line intersects the red line when indigo is high, what will be the CEO's mood?" the CFO asked. "Is the chocolate-colored line inversely proportional to th...