Fundamentals of Self-Service Business Intelligence

Businesses need to be able to easily identify the most important aspects of their products and services, constantly improve their products and services, and access the correct information at the correct time. Businesses have been investing in business intelligence tools to support these objectives for years, but many products still don’t offer the level of self-service that business users expect.

Business Intelligence (BI) is a catchphrase that seems to be thrown around over and over again. BI is a way of analyzing data and using that data to improve business processes and decisions. Essentially, BI is a way to obtain more insight from data. When a business has a lot of data points, it can be confusing to sift through all of that information. Using BI, a business can obtain a more accurate picture of a situation and make a better decision.

But what is self-service Business Intelligence, and why is it important? Let’s understand it.

What is Self-Service Business Intelligence?

In a lot of ways, self-service BI has been a boon to the business analytics industry. With a growing number of cloud-based BI platforms, there is no longer a need for data scientists to build and maintain the tools needed to make sense of business data. Instead, companies can employ business analysts to click around in a dashboard and ask questions about the data. 

A dashboard is a user-friendly interface that enables users to visualize and explore data from a variety of sources on a single screen. In a traditional BI system, users would have to use a command-line interface or a programming language to access a dashboard.

A lot of organizations have been slowly moving toward self-service business intelligence (BI) over the last ten years. Nowadays, most BI projects employ a mix of both traditional and self-service approaches, and the use of self-service BI is rapidly growing. As a result, BI is becoming a critical skill for business professionals. 

Self-Service Business Intelligence: Enabling Informed Decisions

In the last decade, the world of business intelligence has been transformed from a tool used by a few “big data” shops into a nearly ubiquitous technology that now everyone uses. The rise of the internet and the move towards digital services have made data a commodity rather than a scarce resource, and businesses now have a growing need for information to make better business decisions.

Using self-service business intelligence, organizations are able to analyze their data in real-time, providing business leaders with actionable insights that enable them to make better decisions. However, in order for self-service BI to be truly effective, organizations need to have access to technical and user-friendly tools that can help them gain insights and answer their business and technical questions, and that’s where self-service BI access and self-service BI services come into play.

Traditional BI vs. Self-Service BI 

Business intelligence is an important means for organizations to gain insight into their business operations. The concept of business intelligence entails the collection, analysis, and delivery of business information. There are several types of business intelligence. There are the more traditional business intelligence tools, which are typically used in traditional sales, marketing, finance, manufacturing, quality, supply chain, R&D, legal, and other business processes.

The market value of traditional business intelligence often evolved from its “branding,” supported by industry experts like Oracle, SAP Business Objects, or IBM Cognos. A vital triumph of self-service business intelligence over traditional business intelligence is that it empowers data discovery, providing an easy and quick channel to work around the “obstacles of data extraction and data preparation.”

Final Words

Business leaders recognize the need for an effective approach to business intelligence and data mining. Most data and analytics initiatives in the corporate world today rely on the disparate data sources of the various departments to provide insight and analysis on the current state of the organization. 
Self Service Business Intelligence is the process of creating an enterprise data warehouse. The warehouses contain data from diverse sources, such as CRM systems, mail servers, financial systems, database systems, and more, and allow for easy sharing of data across the company.

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