Question

Consider the idea of 'self-service BI' and 'self-service analytics' from the standpoint of a large company, such as GE - what do you see as the key benefits and the key threats of embracing those practices?

Answer 1

Self-service BI:

self-service BI tasks are those that business users carry out themselves instead of passing them on to IT for fulfillment.

The aim is to give the users of BI tools more freedom and responsibility at the same time. At its heart lies the notion of user independence and self-sufficiency when it comes to the use of corporate information, which leads to a decentralization of BI in the organization.

One of the reasons why companies increasingly adopt self-service solutions is to address the challenge of business departments to have access to data and information anytime and anywhere.

Key Benefits:

The central promise of self-service is to improve agility and flexibility in business departments by increasing user independence from IT departments.

The flexibility self-service BI gives users when working with new or existing information is highly valuable.

Used correctly, self-service BI enables business users to create the specific reports they need to tackle challenging business problems in a timely fashion.

The reduced dependence on external resources allows business users to produce information and insight far more efficiently.

Efficiency is gained mostly by skipping the tedious translation process for business requirements.

Key threats:

Resources aren’t used efficiently enough,

Compliance and legal requirements aren’t fulfilled,

The quality and efficiency of the entire corporate management is affected,

The ability to innovate and compete with the help of analytics can be compromised.

Self service analytics :

It can be defined as simple form of business intelligence (BI), where business users are empowered to access relevant data, perform queries and generate reports themselves with the help of easy-to-use self-service BI tools. The entire self-service process is simplified or scaled down for better usability.

Key Benefits:

Empower business users:In this age of data explosion, if analytics tasks are confined within a limited set of people, then the organization will not be able to leverage the power of analytics.

Work together for better productivity: Self-service analytics users and core data science team can work together for the best result.

Democratize Big Data: Democratization of big data is only possible when it is used by the majority of the users.

Key Threats:

Lack of proper training:The first step is to select right set of people and train them rigorously on self-service BI tools.
Data inconsistency: Any inconsistency in data can lead to an inconsistent and erroneous output.
Lack of proper governance:Any loop holes in the governance process can make it a mess.
Risk of self-service tools: You cannot completely rely on self-service BI tools as these tools can also have errors. So it can be risky, if the results from these tools are not checked and verified properly.