What is self-service BI?
Self-service BI empowers business users to explore data and generate insights as well as to create dashboards or reports, without relying on IT, data scientists or analysts. The premise of self-service business intelligence is to give all employees access to insights that will help them make better decisions, regardless of analytics skills.
This approach is most effective in a governed environment with trusted data sources and standardized data definitions that let everyone work with the same metrics and dimensions so they can confidently take action with the insights they discover.
Why is self-service business intelligence important?
As the pace of business accelerates, business users need faster, easier access to data that will help them keep up with, and stay ahead of the changing landscape.
With traditional business intelligence, users who wanted data insights had to submit a request to IT, wait for their turn in the queue, and go back and forth answering clarifying questions — all before they could get answers. Because the process took so long, many times the insights came too late.
Plus, many people don’t use data when making business decisions because they feel like their skills are lacking. Relying solely on intuition results in errors and suboptimal decision making that businesses cannot afford in this day and age.
What are the benefits of self-service BI?
- Faster Insights: When business users can access data from any source at any time, without relying on IT, the insights flow faster, and decisions can be made without delays. Freed up from defining and communicating business requirements to other teams, users can more efficiently gain insights, make faster decisions, and stay one step ahead of the competition.
- Deeper Discovery: Business users shouldn’t be restricted to linear, query-based analysis. Instead, they should have the freedom to explore relevant data any which way they like. Qlik’s Associative Engine lets users uncover blind spots in data that would otherwise go unnoticed with query-based tools. Analytics are recalculated after each click while highlighting associated and unrelated values so users always have context to guide their analysis and discover unexpected insights.
- Increased Data Literacy: Data literacy is the ability to read, work with, analyze and argue with data. One-third of employees believe that data literacy will help them be more productive, while 22 percent believe it can help them reduce stress. Self-service BI tools can help organizations develop a data literate culture by giving all employees the opportunity to learn the language of analytics, easily visualize and explore data and advance their analytical skills.
- Less IT Burden: With traditional business intelligence solutions, IT teams spend their time clarifying business requirements and preparing reports that are surely outdated by the time they’re delivered to data consumers. A self-service solution gives users the tools to build dashboards and reports to conduct analysis on their own. That means IT has more time for high-value work such as tending to data governance, ensuring data is clean and consistent, and prioritizing mission-critical application development.
A best-in-class, self-service business intelligence architecture is just one way Qlik Sense sets the benchmark for next-generation data analytics technologies. Our one-of-a-kind associative analytics engine and sophisticated AI empowers people at all skill levels to freely explore data, make bigger discoveries and uncover bolder insights that can’t be obtained using other analytics tools.
With Qlik, you can support nearly any use case and massively scale users and data, empowering everyone in your organization to make better decisions every day.
Any questions? Please feel free to contact us!
Kind Regards,
The Insight Consulting Team