Self-Service BI can be a wonderful thing. Ideally, business users will have a wealth of corporate information at their fingertips and be able to produce meaningful reports quickly and easily themselves, freeing up time for BI developers to work on other meaningful BI initiatives such as scorecarding, data warehousing, data mining – just to mention a few.
The real danger, however, is that Self-Service BI can be an IT driven initiative to reduce workload on itself, often resulting in a product built entirely from an IT perspective with limited input from business since they are often “too busy” to talk about BI. The end result can at best be confusing and at worst useless to the business user community.
In my experience, the best results in BI are achieved when developers and business users work closely and collaboratively on business and technical issues. When the developer or data modeler can understand the business being modeled and the business user can understand the basic technicalities of the design, a true win-win can be achieved. This is not to say that a developer must fully understand the complete business end-to-end, or that the business user must understand each line of code. But when each can see the solution from the other’s perspective, an optimal solution is close at hand.
Overall, Self-Service BI can be successful if:
- The scope is well defined
- The business is well-defined and understood by developers and modelers
- Business users are active participants in planning, designing and testing
- The business user community is well trained in the BI environment’s reporting tools
This last point is particularly essential if business users are expected to create their own reports.