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There’s a lot of talk these days about the importance of
self-service business intelligence (BI), but little discussion about
the downsides. Unfortunately, I’ve seen self-service BI initiatives go
completely awry.
Typically, a small percentage of power users
employ the new-fangled tools to create tens of thousands of
reports—many of which contain conflicting or inaccurate data—and this
makes it harder for casual users to find the right report or trust its
contents. Ironically, many turn to IT to create a custom report, which
expands the report backlog that self-service BI was supposed to
eliminate. In addition, many power users use the self-service tools to
query large data sets that they export to Excel for analysis. These
runaway queries erode query performance significantly, making the BI
environment even less inviting for casual users.
So despite
its allure, self-service BI can cause overall BI usage to plummet,
report backlogs to grow, query performance to diminish, and information
inconsistency to increase. To avoid such unintended consequences, here
are five ways to implement self-service BI properly:
1. Deploy the right type of self-service BI. Power users need ad hoc report creation while casual users need ad hoc report navigation.
There is a big difference. Powers users need to create reports from
scratch, often accessing data from multiple locations. Casual users, on
the other hand, simply want a report or dashboard that contains their
top ten performance metrics and makes it easy to drill down into
details, if desired.
2. Don’t abdicate responsibility for creating standard reports. To
ensure that business units exploit the full value of the data
warehousing resource, BI teams should take an active role in creating
standard reports or dashboards for each group. This requires BI teams
to get more engaged with the business, not less, which is usually what
happens when an organization deploys self-service BI tools. It is not
enough to create the data warehouse; if you want widespread adoption,
you need to deliver the end-to-end solution.
3. Create a network of super users. Super users are
technically-inclined power users in each department who function as
extensions to the corporate BI team. Their job is to create ad hoc
reports around the edges of the standard reports, suggest enhancements
to the standard reports, and work with the BI Competency Center to
define standards, select tools, and create a BI roadmap. Super users
are the eyes and ears of the corporate BI team within each business
group and critical to its success.
4. Liberate and manage power users. Power users can make or
break a BI program. To get them on your side, give power users access
to the best tools, unlimited access to data, and a sandbox within the
data warehouse in which to conduct their ad hoc explorations. To ensure
that they don’t proliferate spreadmarts, limit their ability to publish
reports back to the server and establish a review board of power users
(i.e. their peers) to examine new requests for published reports. This
two-pronged approach will both empower power users to generate critical
insights while minimizing their ability to foment report chaos
5. Educate executives to use standard, certified reports. For
self-service BI to really work, executives need to make a companywide
declaration and commitment to use standard, certified reports or
dashboards when making decisions. Of course, there will always be
exceptions, like when standard reports don’t contain the data needed to
address issues required for a decision. But a corporate edict backed up
by action makes all the difference.
Following these five steps will help your BI program achieve the holy grail of self-service BI.
Wayne Eckerson is TDWI's Director of Research. TDWI (The Data Warehousing Institute™) provides education, training,
certification, news, and research for executives and information
technology (IT) professionals worldwide. Founded in 1995, TDWI is the
premier educational institute for business intelligence and data
warehousing.
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