Self-Service Business Intelligence Empowers the Business User
Most Business Intelligence (BI) I professionals want to give users the ability to create their own reports as a way to liberate them from IT intermediaries and the backlogs in getting their reports produced. But most users aren’t capable of accessing databases and formatting result sets to analyse data and create visualisations. The few users who thrive in this environment—typically the power users-- create so many reports that performance, storage, and accessibility become serious issues. Today, savvy companies are balancing ad hoc BI with tailored delivery of reports to optimise user adoption.
Fortunately, there is a new crop of self-service BI tools (such as Tableau) that promises to empower users while liberating the BI team from ad hoc reporting tasks. To work, these tools must be easier to use than previous generations of BI tools while giving the BI team a measure of control over the semantic representation of back-end systems and oversight of the creation of standardized reports and dashboards for decision making.
Claudia Imhoff and Colin White recently published TDWI research report they authored on self-service BI. This research covers the tools, techniques, and technologies that leading-edge BI teams are deploying to users to improve their ability to create ad hoc reports and analytics and service their own information needs. The research covers
What Self-service BI really means
What technologies support the empowerment of your business users
How to deploy these technologies in a sustainable fashion
The best practices and practical tips to ensure success
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