The Business Benefits of Self-Service BI

Companies are adopting a new approach to business intelligence (BI), suitable for the current economy and corporate environment. The new trend of self-service business intelligence, offering business users the opportunity for real-time data access and application, provides serious advantages for companies in today’s marketplace.

Traditionally, BI has been the realm of trained IT professionals, mostly due to the highly technical nature of BI software. The development of user-friendly BI solutions, which can be customized even by non-technical business users, has provided companies with the opportunity to access data and create reports without relying on IT personnel. Hence the term, “self-service business intelligence:” reports and dashboards maintained by end-users for themselves.

Self-service BI tools can be client software or browser-based, utilizing familiar user interface (UI) features such as drag-and-drop and wizards. Non-technical business users can quickly learn to accessing their data and achieve new insights through creating and customizing their own reports, dashboards and analytical applications.

The following are the primary benefits of incorporating self-service BI in an organization:

Superior Decision Making

In the past, BI tools were the domain of upper management for the purpose of global decision making. Using self-service BI tools, managers and other corporate end-users enjoy constant access to reference data, supporting low-level, daily decision making. Given the tighter economy, managers are conducting business more carefully and require more (and more detailed) information at their fingertips. With the speed and flexibility of self-service BI, insightful assessments and evaluations are bound to drastically improve company performance in every realm of the business.

Increased Competitive Advantage by Reducing Dependence on IT

In today’s business world, IT personnel are overextended. Challenging economic times have forced enterprise IT groups to reduce staff. There is a shortage of first-rate IT personnel available for hire. As businesses today demand more information from their limited IT personnel, end-users find they are perpetually waiting for their requested reports to emerge from a backlogged IT queue.

Self-service BI is an ideal solution. End-users may now access data on their own and create and modify their own reports, dashboards, queries and analytic applications. Results of analysis are promptly available for use, saving business users from annoying and costly delays.

When information previously stuck in IT backlogs becomes readily available, companies enjoy an edge over their competitors. This is because decision-makers in the organization can reach calculated predictions and smart business decisions ahead of competitors who do not have similarly fast and powerful access to their data.

Improved Communication

Information transmission between workers is frequently subject to error; what one might label as the “broken-telephone” syndrome. Misunderstandings and delayed communication between business users and the IT staff responsible to create and maintain BI reports is generally accepted as a necessary drawback to teamwork within a corporate environment. However, in a self-service BI scenario, BI development and data analysis are both performed by the business user him/herself, eliminating these communication mishaps.

Self-service BI also facilitates inter-departmental communication where barriers may have existed previously. Cooperation in processing and applying pertinent business information made available through self-service BI tools provide companies with distinct advantages over their competitors.

Free Up IT Personnel

An average IT consultant devotes an excessive amount of time to creation and modification of reports, dashboards and cubes in response to business user requests. Most users require customized reports and regularly ask for minor modifications, demanding the time of highly-specialized IT personnel for tasks that are easily accomplished by the business users themselves using self-service BI.

As business users assume responsibility for routine, low-level BI operations, IT professionals are freed to devote their expertise in a more specialized capacity to broader concerns such as data governance and security.

Increase Revenues While Reducing Costs

One of the remarkable advantages of incorporating self-service BI in an organization is that while IT costs are reduced, companies discover that they are experiencing an increase in revenues. There are different reasons this occurs.

Firstly, superior decision-making supported by extensive access to pertinent data is certain to increase profits. A vision of the future of the company and of trends in the global market based on information gathered by end-users provides companies with the upper hand.

Secondly, time is money and self-service BI saves time. Instead of employees whiling away their time, endlessly waiting for reports from overextended BI staff, report turnover time will greatly increase.

Lastly, self-service BI reduces the amount of time-consuming BI development resources required. Corporate end users handle the maintenance of reports and dashboards which, as mentioned previously, previously fell under the jurisdiction of high-salaried IT personnel.

Conclusion: Self-Service BI Contributes to Business Success

To succeed in today’s competitive market while coping with a challenging economy, companies must avail themselves of as much relevant, real-time data as possible. Likewise, they must possess the ability to exploit that information as broadly and as quickly as possible. Incorporation of self-service BI practices is a viable alternative to relying solely on backlogged traditional BI support, delivering benefits with the potential to propel companies into a new level of successful business ventures.