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“The specific function designed within the BI environment to give BI users the ability to become more capable and less relied on IT.”
To meet this emerging need and improve time to build, companies are looking for different choices for BI. One such approach is to build the infrastructure that supports the BI environment in which the Power users can collaborate specific sets of BI reports, Dashboards, Logic, and analytics with less dependence on IT.
The advantage of self Service BI is to extend the scope of BI applications to address a wider range of business users and help them solve the needs and problems of complex scenarios. At the same time, this extension must support the information workers need for a personalized and collaborative decision-making framework.
It lists down a few business scenarios where self-service capabilities of the BI platform make a difference to an organization’s ability to meet its business goals. After establishing a business case for self-service BI, the document gives a brief introduction to Self Service BI environment. Without going into technicalities, it lays down the key features that can enable a self-service Bi environment.
Self Service Business Intelligence is much under discussion these days. Users find traditional BI platforms to be too complex and technical for them to use, and at the same time, the IT team finds it difficult to meet the ever-rising information needs of business users. The self-service environment aims at removing the distance between the people who generate a report and people who actually use it.
To meet the rising information and analytical needs, there is a need for BI users to be more empowered and BI tools to be more exhaustive. From a functional point of view, three things make the base for a self-service environment - an interactive and simple user interface, a set of tools that serve changing needs and accommodate new work practices, and a robust backend data support to allow the first two. There are several tools from various vendors that provide self-service capabilities in some form or another.
Four key objectives of Self Service BI:
1) Make it easy to use.
2) Make it easy to access data.
3) Make the DW solution fast to manage and deploy.
Implementing Self Service BI is more difficult than BI professionals anticipate.
Differing User Requirements: Business requirements keep changing. BI Solutions must be implemented quickly to take advantage of the business strategy. The timely market solution is the key to Self Service BI Solution’s success.
The Balance: Self-service BI requires clean, comprehensive, and integrated data, and a few of the key factors are:
a) Poor Data Quality: Abnormal definition of the same metric has been a critical reason in getting poor data quality. The same metric may have various definitions across different departments of the same organization. The definitions or KPI can be created based on functional rules which are based on functional rules which are the same across the whole organization.
b) Data Integration: Data Integration rules comes into picture when data has not been formatted before aggregating
c) Logical Errors: Logical errors are the addition of the data integration issues where a KPI or metric definition is taken out of content to do the analysis.
User can’t afford to wait:
Solution: Get Self-Service Right! Training should involve the Functionalities of the tool and which data elements and fields can help them with their analysis. It should also include security policy recommendations.
This trend of Self Service BI was started by Business objects with Web Intelligence and was marketed as an Ad-Hoc reporting tool. This tool did provide the business users the capability of Self Service BI; however, packed with powerful features; it became difficult for business users to understand queries and functionality.
With changing times and usage patterns, features of BI have changed. Over the past decade, BI has evolved from the crude Integrated Development environment to tools that have been easy to use and navigate.
Business users or analysts can now use these tools to analyze the data, create reports, and dashboards.
Primary reasons why Self Service BI is required:
Self Service BI is a BI platform that allows BI users to be more self-reliant and less dependent on the IT team of their organization.
In simple words, Self Service BI is nothing but a user being able to get the data that she wants in a format she understands, and within the time frame, she has. Now there is a range of functionalities of a BI platform that enable business users to be more self-sufficient and BI tools to be more user-friendly. How many of these are achievable within the cost and a performance boundary is a matter of separate discussion, though.
If you don’t go into technical details or in a layman’s language, a self-service BI platform should be able to serve the following needs:
The job of IT is to support the business. In the end, the worth of any IT solution lies in the amount it can contribute to the bottom line of an organization. Hence let us go through a few business scenarios where an organization’s existing Business Intelligence infrastructure finds it difficult to support day to day information needs of business users.
An organization ‘ABC Motors,’ a car manufacturer, faced a drastic reduction in top and bottom lines during the recession, which started late 2008. Due to dropped sales and changing consumer preferences, it accumulated a huge amount of inventory, especially those of high-end multi-utility vehicles. On the one hand, it had to cut its IT spending by reducing IT headcount. On the other hand, it needed to enhance its responsiveness to changes in the volume and patterns of the demand.
For this responsiveness, its executives need to dig into data and do various kinds of analysis to find out new business trends and to respond to them quickly. Calling an already understrength IT department to fetch a few new reports in quick time was an exercise in vain.
John, a marketing manager at online travel and ticketing company, wants to regularly perform varied kinds of analysis on his sales data to find the impact of various environmental conditions. Those conditions include the time of year, time of travel, weather conditions, holidays, promotional schemes, competition’s promotional offers, new advertising campaigns, etc. The analysis and reports that he needs to keep changing every day. His need is to play around with data as and when he wants.
Dan is an executive assistant to the CEO of a large corporate house. While preparing presentations for regular meetings, he usually needs financial data at a very high level (Ex: Business Vertical, Territory, etc.). Huge reports with data presented at a very granular level are of little use for him. But sometimes, when a problem is detected in some part of the organization, to diagnose the root cause, he feels the need to drill down into the data to lower level granularities.
ABC bank is a large investment bank with operations across the globe. Bank provides capital market research reports to investors who use its trading desk for their investments. Due to various market manipulation frauds that have occurred in the past, market regulator keeps a close watch on the research reports that investment banks publish. Hence ABC bank has established a centralized database where all the research data is stored. Governance and checks have been put at various levels to ensure that all the data and research work passes through regulatory filters before reaching to publishing desk. The bank has instructed all its analysts to do all there research work on centralized servers. Ricky, a research analyst of ABC bank, has been working with MS Excel spreadsheets for a long time. He finds excel applications very intuitive and very convenient to use. As he keeps traveling across the globe to visit clients, he finds it a major bottleneck in connecting to centralized servers to do some analysis. It is also very convenient for him to email excel sheets to his clients and associates. For him, MS Excel is a full-fledged BI tool, and Banks' newly established BI platform seems more of a hindrance.
All the above scenarios are not very uncommon in today’s volatile market conditions. Business feels the need to respond to the challenges as swiftly as possible with the methods and approaches which are far away from being ‘Standard.’ With business scenarios changing every day, it is very difficult for system designers to anticipate all the possible business needs at the time of tool implementation. This leads to the following key drivers for a new set of BI tools:
The solution lies in building a BI platform that is very flexible to accommodate changing business needs and in empowering users to serve their own needs with minimal intervention from or dependency on IT. In summary, it reduces the need for time and effort involved in building a report for a new idea.
These seem to be ideal features for any BI solution; at the same time, these are unachievable without overstretching the costs and compromising the performance. Self Service BI tools endeavor to walk on the tight rope.
Let me briefly explain all the features of self-service Power BI. I am also trying to put some techno-friendly names to these business needs.
A business user is never concerned about what is happening at the backend. A sales manager is interested in knowing which product is selling in which market rather than in understanding the data structure of the database. Neither is he interested in going through a five-day training course for being able to use a so-called cutting edge business intelligence tool. Irrespective of what is happening in the backend, he wants a few simple things to happen on his desktop.
Business expectations from BI are evolving rapidly. A traditional text-based report is no more sufficient. To support the business decisions in a desirable time frame, BI should have features and tools which make it easier to work all level of users and strong enough to support analytical and presentation needs of most sophisticated users.
There should be a robust data warehouse to support all that we have discussed so far. But this is not limited to data structured in one warehouse. It has become increasingly important for a user to understand the complete picture. To gain contextual knowledge, the user must have access to external data (e.g., weather information, geographic, demographic, or psychographic data, comments or e-mails, social media sources). Also, a data warehouse should be fast to deploy and easy to manage so that changes can be incorporated swiftly.
It might sound that SSBI is a panacea or a holy grail that can meet all the demands that businesses put in front of a BI platform. The reality, on the other hand, is far from it. On the one hand, a self-service environment empowers users to do a lot of reporting and analytics on their own. Still, on the other hand, it exposes the system to improper usage and might make it more complex for casual users.
: Many vendors, both big and small, have come up with self capabilities added to their BI offerings. Following are a few of those tools:
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