Self-Service Business Intelligence – Leverage the Business Progress

Today, technology is growing rapidly; businesses and organizations need to catch up with the innovation and transform themselves to get the most out of it. We are well aware of the business data that has continuously expanded and it is difficult for us to manage such a big amount of data without upgrading to the latest technologies. Analyzing the data through business intelligence in order to manage it effectively has now become very important for all companies and organizations.

“Self-service BI is basically the process, tools and software used by various companies and organizations for the empowerment of business users to choose, filter, compare, visualize and analyze data on their own, eradicating the need for specialized and advanced IT training”.

It is quite obvious that business intelligence is designed to help out business people extract insights from past performance, analyze and predict various events of the future in order to avoid obstacles before time. Investing in this emerging future technology can soon prove to be a very productive and successful decision for businesses. The latest tools tend to generate quality business insights and facilitate in providing long-term growth, regardless of the economic cycle.

Gartner defines Self-Service BI as “end users designing and deploying their own reports and analyses within an approved and supported architecture and tools portfolio.”

Various corporates and organizations are trying their best to gain actionable insights and put them forward to their business users so that they could enhance their grip on statistical analysis and data mining. In order to achieve this crucial milestone, the trend of self-service analytics drastically gain momentum in the field of technology that has greatly transformed the ways of businesses. One of the greatest pros of self-service business intelligence is that it has secured business users from the reliance on the third-parties including various data analysts, data scientists etc.; and has allowed them to make timely strategic & operational decisions. Apart from this, the implementation of self-service BI doesn’t necessarily require a complete reboot of the previous investments.

Self-service business intelligence facilitates an atmosphere in which non-IT professionals may gain valuable insights from multiple different sources on demand and for achieving these procedures self-service BI provide:

Self-Service Data Development

Self-service business intelligence empowers the collection of data sets right before maintaining the data of the most suited format into your BI system for various analysis and reporting. This action tends to serve the distinct analytical needs of your business users including streaming analytics, historical analytics, predictive analytics, etc.

The self-service data preparation tools perform such tasks as:

• Accessing and cataloguing data.
• Data parsing and profiling.
• Transforming and modelling data for analysis.
• Refining and enriching data.

Among the most definitive examples of these tools, various Power BI technologies as Power Query and Power BI dataflows that, besides absorbing and storing such a big amount of data from multiple data sources, enable purification, transformation and integration of the data also enriching & schematizing it to dive really deep into your business.

Data Integration from Multiple Sources

A self-service BI enables integration with various other data sources including CRM, ERP, accounting and marketing software etc. Moreover, we know that the main issues come out of the big data sources so a self-service business intelligence must show adaptability to the big data sources that may include, IoT data, streaming data, social media data, etc., in order to expand the insights into the big data analysis.

A Well-Suited Interface to Every Business User

An easy-to-use interface for data analysis, visualization, effective reporting, sharing and efficient collaboration is one of the important components of self-service BI and also referred to its technical expertise that tends to satisfy the various demands of business users.

One of the great examples that come to our minds is the Power BI a well-known leader among self-service software due to its adorable and friendly interface. Owing to its compelling features and instinctive interface, international real estate developers tend to analyze financial data regardless of any burden and understand their business in a better way.

Most of the end-users are able to obtain value from self-service analytics technologies utilizing simpler business terms and that has been made possible with the non-technical representation of the corporate data that also allow faster adoption to self-service Business intelligence. Moreover, they can have a conjugated or combined view of data that is relevant to the terms i.e; ‘customer’ or ‘product’ without the need for knowing the relational structure of the tables where the data is stored.

Strong Data Protection

After the implementation of the self-service BI, the very first step one must take is to set up the data governance framework in order to avoid any sort of incompatible or invalid outputs across business units or any uncertain data leakage. In spite of the agility of the self-service BI, there are certain risks that must be brought into account before attempting anything because you are dealing with the most sensitive information of your business. It is an absolute fact that self-service normally has a built-in data governance feature. But it is very important to organize your own data management process according to your industry-specific, the number of users, BI objectives etc.