Research Spotlight: Self-Service Business Intelligence

Self-service business intelligence (BI) refers to a type of BI software that enables users to access, analyze, and visualize data without the need for specialized technical skills or IT support. This empowers business users to take control of their own data and make data-driven decisions, leading to improved productivity and better business outcomes.

Top-performing companies are leveraging self-service BI and embedded analytics to drive revenue growth and profitability in several ways.

First, self-service BI allows businesses to quickly and easily access and analyze large volumes of data from various sources, such as customer databases, sales data, and financial records. This enables them to identify trends, patterns, and opportunities that would otherwise be hidden in the data, and to make more informed, data-driven decisions.

Second, self-service BI tools often come with a range of pre-built dashboards, reports, and visualizations that allow business users to quickly and easily gain insights from their data. This eliminates the need for IT departments to spend time and resources building custom reports and dashboards, freeing them up to focus on other tasks.

Third, self-service BI enables businesses to easily share insights and data with other stakeholders, such as executives, managers, and employees. This allows teams to collaborate and make data-driven decisions together, improving communication and decision-making across the organization.

Finally, self-service BI and embedded analytics can help businesses improve customer experiences by providing real-time insights into customer behavior, preferences, and needs. This enables businesses to offer personalized, relevant, and timely interactions with customers, leading to improved customer satisfaction and loyalty.

In addition to the benefits mentioned above, self-service BI and embedded analytics can also help businesses to reduce costs and improve efficiency. By allowing business users to access and analyze their own data, self-service BI eliminates the need for IT departments to spend time and resources on data preparation, analysis, and reporting. This can help to reduce the overall cost of data management and analysis, freeing up resources for other tasks.

Furthermore, self-service BI can help businesses to reduce reliance on external consultants and analysts. By empowering business users to access and analyze their own data, businesses can reduce the need to hire external experts to help with data analysis and decision-making. This can help to improve efficiency and reduce costs, while also enabling businesses to maintain control over their data and insights.

It’s worth noting that implementing self-service BI and embedded analytics is not a one-size-fits-all solution, and companies will need to carefully consider their specific needs and goals when choosing the right tools and strategies for their business.

For example, some businesses may want to focus on empowering a small group of power users, who can then train and support other business users in using the self-service BI tools. This can help to ensure that the tools are being used effectively and efficiently, while also minimizing the need for IT support.

Other businesses may want to focus on providing a wide range of self-service BI and embedded analytics tools to as many business users as possible. This can help to foster a culture of data-driven decision-making throughout the organization, and can enable more people to access and analyze data in real-time.

Ultimately, the key to success with self-service BI and embedded analytics is to choose the right tools and strategies for your business, and to provide adequate training and support to ensure that business users can effectively use the tools to generate actionable insights and drive better business outcomes.

Our upcoming research will explore the benefits and challenges of self-service BI, and provide examples of how top-performing companies are using these tools to generate actionable insights, improve business productivity, and drive revenue growth and profitability. We will also discuss the role of self-service BI in integrating with other enterprise systems, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, and the impact of this integration on data quality and decision making.