Art of BI: Successful Self-Service BI

Self-Service Business Intelligence (SSBI) is quickly gaining support by businesses and organizations as they seek to empower their users in the key decision-making processes through contextualized analytics. Self-service BI provides a unified working environment to users, ensuring that more benefits are reaped from its commercial application.

Benefits of Self-Service BI

SSBI allows less tech-savvy end users to make decisions based on their own queries and analyses. This enables BI users to become more self-reliant and less dependent on IT teams.

Let’s discuss the ways in which using SSBI could be helpful for your organization.

User empowerment

Self-service BI empowers users with data and data analysis tools that enable them to perform their own analytics. It has greatly enhanced the democratization of Big Data by providing awareness and ease of access among the common users involved in self-service analytics tasks.

Focus on core tasks

With SSBI, users are able to extract and consume reports from integrated data on disparate systems. By performing the less intensive tasks like data exploration, verification, visualization, and reporting on their own, they are able to free up the IT and core data teams. As a result, the technical teams can concentrate on more critical and complex tasks, adding value to the workflow.

Collaboration

Self-service BI provides a platform that enables the end users and core IT and data analytical teams to work together harmoniously. The end users can help themselves with self-service BI, and the IT and technical data teams can take input from the self-service team to further perform more advanced analytics. This increases the response time to changes in the business environment and in turn improves the organization’s overall decision-making process.

Proactive culture

With self-service BI, businesses and organizations are able to access the most up-to-date data, helping them gain insights immediately after new data arrives. By working proactively, organizations can improve the allocation of resources, the decision-making process, and response time to changes in the business environment. This can help them increase market share by identifying underserved territories, discovering new placement opportunities, and/or expanding into new distribution channels.

Save time, resources and money

Support costs with self-service BI are significantly lower than they are with more complex BI solutions as users can get up-to-speed with minimal training. Self-service BI enables users to access and analyze their data from practically anywhere, with any browser-based information access and analytics device. This enables them to save a lot of time and resources and translates into cost savings due to the improved efficiency and reduced risks.

Available Tools

A thorough understanding of data analysis tools is needed for the effective implementation of self-service BI applications. This is vital as different users with varying needs will require the right BI tools in order to take full advantage of the self-service functionality.

The following is a list of the currently available self-service BI tools:

• Zoho Reports
• Microsoft Power BI
• Tableau Desktop
• Oracle Data Visualization Desktop
• Oracle Visual Analyzer
• Looker
• Domo
• Qlik Sense Enterprise Server
• Information Builders WebFocus
• Tibco Spotfire
• Chartio
• Clearify QQube
• IBM Cognos Business Intelligence

Maximizing BI Tools

A properly configured data warehouse and infrastructure that supports a business intelligence system enable users to query the data and create personalized reports with very little effort. It also makes it fast and easy to deploy and manage BI tools. This, in turn, helps cut costs, improve value, and support increasingly complex data processing.

We at Datavail can help you and your business overcome the potential hurdles associated with the implementation of a self-service BI system. With our vast knowledge and experience with Oracle, Microsoft, and MySQL BI products, and our specialized teams, Datavail is able to implement and support your organization’s new self-service BI applications as well as advise and train your team. Visit our website for more information on our Business Intelligence & Analytics services.

Datavail is the largest provider of data services in North America with more than 800 DBAs, analysts, developers and consultants. We offer 24×7 managed services and project consulting in database administration, BI/Analytics, data warehousing, and enterprise performance management. Datavail’s expert consulting team specializes in integrations, implementations, and upgrades for applications across the Oracle stack, including Hyperion, OBIEE, OBIA, GoldenGate, Weblogic and more.

For additional resources please download our white paper, Seven BI and Analytics Services That Strengthen Your Oracle Infrastructure