Self Service BI – Do It Your Self, Your Way

The terminology ‘Business Intelligence (BI)’ is now engraved into enterprises and business operations across the globe. It, no longer, is an individual entity that may or may not be adopted by organizations, who indeed want to turn out successful and aim high.

With BI spreading its wings all around, there are various faces of BI that one can see: Cloud BI, Mobile BI, Self Service BI and there are exemplary BI tools and technologies available in the IT scenario. Focusing on an amalgamation of processes and technologies to extract, store, analyze and transform data into enriched information, BI holds the potential to turntables for a non-performing organization to a maximized ROI unit. There are service providers, who as required, can develop solutions that can give you your desired output in real-time and at the right place.

But, what is most important with such information is that it should be able to reach the most vital set of people and they should be able to extract desired information in the needed time with the required format, their own way and preferably, themselves. This is where the role of Self Service BI comes into play. Depending upon solution providers all the time is not something any higher management official or for that matter, anyone would like to do.

What Are The Benefits Of Self Service BI?

The focus of Self Service BI is to authorize end-users with the right to extract information, their own way, and design and cull out analytical reports in their desired format. The necessary tools and infrastructure is provided to them and based on that, end users can customize and view their own data.

One of the major optimistic purviews is that it frees the end-users from constant interaction with the IT teams and gives them breathing space to work on their own. Naturally, for prior work like data warehousing and more, the IT department will be responsible but once the data is in place, you are free to delve deep into your information. This approach is bound to breathe a sigh of relief not only to end-users but to the IT staff too, who would be freed from continuous interaction with the end-users at each and every step.

Best Practices While Implementing Self Service BI

• What must be done is that the Self Service design should necessarily be UI friendly and simplistic since it is directly going to be handled by the end-users.
• Essential training to end-users about available features and access rights is equally vital.
• Understanding of the components in the system and their interpretation needs to be very clear to the end-users.
• Business insight should be ample while building the solution so that even if the reigns are in the hands of the not-so-tech-savvy end users, there are least chances of misinterpretation or chaos within the organization.
• Thorough security procedures, roles, and privileges should be defined before implementation.

SPEC INDIA has umpteen years of experience in various BI techniques like Mobile BI, Self Service BI, and Cloud BI. It, being global partners with Pentaho, has extensive experience in the Pentaho product stack and also proficiency in Jaspersoft BI and Tableau BI.