To identify and respond
quickly to trends and patterns in business data, users or a normal business staff in the company need
self-service BI tools. I think the self-service desktop BI tools should be their first option. The faster the reports or results can be produced, the
better. They don't have to depend on IT department.The user aid can be a point which i think deserve most attention from the self-service desktop BI tools.
This is an article from techtarget technology reporter
beth stackpol,
self-service BI needs flexibility, governance, user Aid. Self-service BI tools, to free IT workers from having to be hands-on in the data analysis process, that is a thing the BI vendors have been doing since 20 years ago. See this article below:
While the self-service business intelligence moniker implies that business users will be able to
effortlessly partake in BI activities, implementing tools that are truly self-service and that get
widely embraced isn't so simple. Technical, procedural and cultural issues can all trip up
deployments if BI managers don't plan carefully and forge a close partnership with their business
counterparts.
In fact, the
road to
self-service BI can be quite bumpy, according to a survey of 234 BI and IT professionals,
business users and consultants conducted in July 2012 by Wayne Eckerson, director of TechTarget
Inc.'s BI Leadership Research unit. Sixty-four percent of the respondents rated the success of
their
self-service
BI initiatives as "average" or lower.
The biggest challenge they cited was that self-service
BI tools require more
training than expected; that answer was chosen by 73% of the respondents. In addition, 61% said
using self-service software "creates report chaos" and 42% said the tools "confuse users." Fifteen
percent even said they were getting more requests for help with self-service tools than they were
before. "How can something be 'self-service' if it requires the IT department to train and support
users continually? That's the conundrum of self-service BI," Eckerson wrote in a report about the
survey.
The key to avoiding such problems, consultants and experienced BI managers say, is eschewing a
one-size-fits-all approach and instead deploying a set of tools and processes that will accommodate
power users as well as "information consumer" users who might require substantial training and
handholding.
Action item: Support user diversity
"Just installing an easy-to-use BI tool doesn't automatically mean you have a self-service BI
environment," said Claudia Imhoff, president and founder of BI consultancy Intelligent Solutions
Inc. in Boulder, Colo. "There are different needs within an organization. You need to know who your
information workers are and what kind of self-service they really want."
For example, tech-savvy users likely will be immediately comfortable with the idea of
using
self-service applications to dive into BI data and create their own queries and reports. For
more casual users, Imhoff said, self-service might simply mean being able to change the parameters
on a report to get a different spin on the data.
Governance
of users is also critical to
self-service
BI success, despite the fact that IT has to loosen its control over the data analysis process.
Working in tandem with business managers, BI teams need to establish common data definitions for
key performance metrics, such as revenue and profitability, so there is organizational consistency
in analyzing them. IT and BI managers should then monitor usage of
self-service
software on an ongoing basis to detect and correct any compliance issues and to head off
runaway queries that could choke the BI system.
Darren Taylor, president of Cobalt Talon, an analytics service provider that is a division of
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City, said BI developers can help avoid such problems by
hard-coding predefined performance metrics into self-service environments. "You could throw raw
data into the self-service BI tool and let people be power users, but then you're talking the Wild
West when creating metrics from one person to the next," said Taylor, who previously was vice
president of enterprise analytics and data management at Blue KC.
Cooking up a self-service BI buffet
In much the same vein, Imhoff counsels
BI
managers to create a starter library of report templates and standard analytics routines as
part of a self-service BI system so business users can pick and choose what they need based on
their requirements. "Think of it as a buffet table of BI components," Imhoff said. "The more work
IT can do on the front end, the more standardized this becomes, and it makes everything run
easier."
Radiology management services provider HealthHelp did lots of work on both the front and back
ends to ensure that its deployment of self-service BI tools was a success, said Steve Spar, the
Houston-based company's chief information officer. IT and BI developers created standardized
metrics for some of HealthHelp's more complex analytics parameters and also refined the data schema
and database architecture underpinning the BI system so business users could easily locate
data.
Spar said that with the right foundational technologies in place, users are truly empowered to
do
self-service BI, freeing IT workers from having to be hands-on in the data analysis process.
"IT moves into a consultative role rather than a task-doing role," he added. "They can then help
those who help themselves."