Good point. The piece is sound in the abstract and is good advice to recall when you consider the essence of your endeavors, but tooling does count when you consider the material situation—some approaches become untenable at certain magnitudes. Funily enough, the best we can do is often trade a big problem for a smaller one—« how do we serve X million people » becomes « how do we teach x thousand employees to use the tool that enables us to serve X million people «
It's fair to say you can't process 40 million bits of data on a whiteboard. On the other hand, if you have 40 million bits of data, but can't work out how to answer the question you're asking of it (or in many cases, what question you're trying to ask!), then it's useless.
This is where whiteboards, paper, and other physical solutions really shine. You can make notes for yourself or communicate with those in your shared physical space in a very immediate, speed-of-thought way.
In general, software (even BI software) is limited to doing what it is programmed to do. We necessarily adapt our thinking to the tools we have to express the ideas we have. Dancing about architecture is difficult, as Steve Martin pointed out.
Well yeah, but before you invest millions in a BI tool, you should decide what you want to do with it first - you can work out what data and statistics you'd like to have in a smaller scale on a whiteboard first.
Investing in a tool without first doing the task by hand is wasteful. No I'm not saying you should do it with all 40 million subscribers, just start with getting one or two and a whiteboard, then a few dozen or hundred in an excel sheet.
When you're a telecom, and you have more than 40 million subscribers, a whiteboard may be a bit limiting.