Self-service BI tools have been around for a while now. Their adoption however has not been wide spread as it is now. There is a much greater awareness of the power of data and cost effectiveness of BI tools. 

 

Traditionally enterprise data management is a costly and complicated process, which requires a plethora of systems and functions. It is also an area within the business that requires the hiring of highly skilled individuals, so it is paramount that the work they do on a day to day basis is VALUE ADDING. IT teams are heavily involved in ensuring that systems are operational, and that data is available throughout the organisation. Similarly, analytics teams are mostly engaged in data preparation, making dashboards, creating reports, and generating insights for the end users. Usually this is a never-ending cycle because the demand always outstrips the supply. What this means is that this highly skilled workforce does not really get to add value as there are always engaged in BAU activities.  Self-service tools help solve this issue and create capacity for the IT professionals, data scientists and analysts, to engage in actual value add activities that will help push the business forward. 

As often is the case, data across functions and departments usually lives in multiple computing systems, which in most instances are not effectively integrated. In some instances, the systems could be totally incompatible making data access, extraction and sharing a cumbersome process. You end up with teams across the organisation having and managing request processes for different types of data. Access to reports, analysis and insights usually involves a lengthy delay as the data must be prepared, sense checked and finally reports put together before being made available to end users. This usually involves a lengthy wait and by the time the report is available the data/insights might have lost its relevance. Self-service BI resolves this through the ability to collate and aggregate data from various systems. This makes cross-functional data available to the entire organisation instantly and uniformly creating a cross functional data repository.

Companies often face inconsistencies in what is reported, insights generated and managing data sources and integrity of data. Self-service BI and Analytics tools help to eliminate these issues because everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet. There is one source of data, which is consistent, updated at the same time and available to all users immediately. The other great aspect of self-service BI and Analytics tools is data aggregation. The ability to pull data from various sources and aggregating it makes analysis and insight generation an enjoyable and exceptionally reliable process, that less technical people can get engaged in. Overall, there will be less issues concerning data accuracy and reliability which is often the case because you will now have one single version of the truth helping aid informed decision making. Gone are the days when one must email two or three people from another department or function to get access to a spreadsheet. In most cases the spreadsheet will contain questionable data because there is no clarity on the source, and how the data itself was captured and prepared. 

Gone are the days where decisions are made on gut feel or “experience” alone. This is not to say the latter no longer has a place in decision making, but rather there are more powerful options that are now available to decision makers. With data now widely available, data led decision making is being continually proven to help move businesses forward. Self-service tools now make it possible for decision makers to engage in “Informed Decision-Making”. It is a fact that decisions are made every day across all functions within a business, self-service BI brings about a vital element of effortlessness to the decision-making process. Its dashboards, reports and visualizations are designed to help users transform data into meaningful insights immediately and effectively. Since the response times are so quick, users are more likely to spend time focused on the analysis, rather than waste time trying to analyse multiple spreadsheets to arrive at substandard analysis.

Finally, business is usually fast paced and most often the companies that can respond faster to changes tend to benefit the most. Ultimately this means that in a well formulated self-service culture, decisions are made quicker because decision makers have the data at their immediate disposal. Arising issues can be quickly interrogated and resolved without having to wait for data and reports to be made available whilst valuable time is lost. It worth looking into the various BI solutions available on the market and trying them out to see how you can transform your business.