Self-service business intelligence (BI) helps business users make sense of data.
Business users can be anyone. They might not have the technical knowledge or skill to access and explore datasets. Self-service BI empowers users to leverage data to optimize the efficiency and effectiveness of their efforts.
Business intelligence software allows users to create unique visualizations of data and make informed decisions without having a background in statistical analysis, data mining, or data manipulation.
Self-service business intelligence is an approach to data analysis that enables non-technical users to access, visualize, understand, and leverage data. These tools allow business users to create data visualizations and dashboards, helping them view and understand information from multiple angles and inform their decision-making process.
Self-service BI helps businesses transform raw data into actionable insights and empowers users to be more productive and efficient. With self-service BI, teams like sales, marketing, and HR can visualize datasets without much back and forth, and IT departments can concentrate on managing security, governance, and other critical tasks.
Whether it’s traditional or self-service BI, both have a unified goal: allowing businesses to visualize and analyze massive volumes of data and gain actionable insights. Analytics platforms with self-service capabilities also generate timely and high-quality data for analytics purposes.
The ways users leverage self-service BI might vary based on requirements. For example, a user might use it to filter and arrange data, while other users might integrate data from multiple sources in the same environment. Self-service BI can cater to various needs of users depending on the type of data they need and the analysis they would like to conduct.
Data demands of modern businesses have scaled proportionally with the volume of data being captured. Professionals need to quickly analyze this data to respond to evolving market trends. Analyzing present data helps them gain insights that help them modify their business operations.
Traditionally, business intelligence was based on a central data warehouse software or a data mart. Although these systems still work well in some cases, the rising demand for data encouraged organizations to move toward a more agile and efficient data analysis approach: self-service BI.
Self-service BI provides flexibility to access data anytime and anywhere without relying on an IT department. It presents a quick and user-friendly interface where users can create reports, data visualizations, and customize their dashboard to make sense of particular data types.
Neerav Parekh
Founder and CEO, vPhrase Analytics Solutions
Neerav added, “Organizations want their people to make data-driven decisions and that’s difficult to achieve unless you provide the power of data exploration right in their hands. New generation BI tools are using the power of natural language processing to make self-service easier. They allow users to ask questions in natural language and then provide answers too in language, anointed with charts. Such ease of use helps overcome the reluctance of business users to get their hands dirty.”
The adoption of self-service BI reduces IT’s control over data. Still, it makes it easier for business users like sales, HR, and marketing to quickly use data and make decisions. IT teams have shifted their focus from catering to data requirements to maintaining data security and governance, ensuring data confidentiality, integrity and availability.
Huy Nguyen, CTO and Founder of Holistics Data, says, "A modern data department should run like a product organization, not an outsourcing team. They should be proactive about adding business value instead of being reactive about it. They should engage with their business counterparts as equal thinking partners rather than merely English-to-SQL translators."
Huy Nguyen
Founder and CTO, Holistics Data
Business users depend on IT or BI teams in traditional BI. The BI teams run queries for business users and provide them analytics, reports, and dashboards based on user requirements. IT teams conduct a requirement gathering process to understand what analytics are in demand, and what dashboards users need to make informed decisions in their projects.
On the other hand, self-service BI allows business users and analysts to independently analyze data and create data visualizations and dashboards with minimum involvement of IT or BI teams. Self-service BI solutions are intuitive and offer an easy-to-use interface that caters to non-technical and power users.
Let’s break down the average business intelligence process:
For companies just getting started with business intelligence or that need reports on-demand, self-service BI is a great option that removes some additional layers listed above.
|
Traditional BI |
Self-service BI |
|
Business users submit requests to IT or BI teams. |
Business users can access and analyze data on their own. |
|
IT teams extract, cleanse, and load data into a data warehouse for analysis. |
Users can access data, create customized dashboards, and conduct analysis. |
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IT teams create reports or dashboards that business users approve or request changes. |
Business users create data models and visualizations themselves. |
The biggest benefit of using a self-service tool is its relatively low barrier to entry. Organizations keep data at the foundation of every decision. Self-service BI makes it easier for business professionals to access and analyze this data to draw meaningful information and insights, without any prerequisite IT or BI skills.
Self-service BI tools provide holistic data access and analytics to business and technical users. Below are various other benefits of self-service BI that businesses leverage for better efficiency, collaboration, and effective decision-making.
An organization’s data is often siloed across multiple departments such as sales, marketing, human resources, and finance. Business users need an integrated view of this data to consider overall business operations and make decisions accordingly.
Self-service BI tools aggregate data from disparate systems and allow users to access and analyze it without relying on the IT department. Users can independently create custom reports and dashboards, enabling IT to focus on more crucial operations to ensure security and data governance. It cuts down the dependencies and allows both IT teams and business users to focus on jobs vital to the business, improving the productivity of both teams.
Self-service BI ensures data consistency across various systems. You get a single source of truth to inform your decision-making process. For small businesses, spreadsheets also serve this purpose. But as you scale, data volume increases, and so do the silos.
If you still use spreadsheets, it can lead to complexities and issues in data transformations across various machines. You would then have to manually pull the data together and make sense of it.
Decision makers spend substantial time and effort manually pulling data from disparate systems to get meaningful information. Self-service BI systems work differently. They allow you to merge data first and create custom reports based on your requirements. Decision makers can leverage their time and effort on utilizing insights gained from custom reports, rather than pulling data manually from systems.
Self-service BI software enables users to quickly access and analyze data and make necessary modifications in business processes. It helps them gain a competitive advantage in a constantly evolving market.
Self-service business intelligence makes data analysis and decision-making effortless. Users can then focus more on analyzing data rather than spending their valuable time exploring multiple spreadsheets to get substandard insights.
Self-service BI software allows users to share custom dashboards across multiple teams so everyone can access the same data. It helps different stakeholders understand the current state of business and optimize operations.
Decision makers are more invested in projects when self-service BI keeps them on the same page, enabling them to share their thoughts, ideas, and suggestions. Moreover, stronger collaboration leads to quick problem solving, where users can express their point of view and address issues as a team.
The most prominent challenge of self-service BI is that visualizations and dashboards from these tools are only as accurate as those of the user who queried the data. This is why it’s important to adequately train those who regularly use these tools. Fixing inaccurate reports means dedicating time and resources that the business can spend elsewhere.
Apart from this, there are a few notable challenges of self-service BI.
Self-service BI might create a false sense of security. Originally, self-service BI adoption was driven by IT departments to free themselves from doing redundant tasks for other teams and focus more on critical IT projects. This reduces the IT team’s control over BI data, which might be at risk due to wider data access.
Reliable business intelligence requires skilled and experienced data engineers to interpret and analyze data. Business users can train themselves in creating data visualizations and reports, but their final output will only be as good as their knowledge in the domain. Training business users to use self-service BI can be tricky when it is not a part of their primary responsibility.
Sometimes, there can be a risk of inconsistent information when multiple users work on different versions of the same data. Such risks can lead to shallow decision-making.
Deploying self-service BI can be chaotic if BI analysts don’t supervise it. There needs to be centralized management that helps business units independently deploy BI solutions. In the absence of supervision, uncontrolled deployment leads to data silos, different BI tools, and more costs, making it challenging to scale properly.
Businesses address these challenges by onboarding a trusted self-service BI tool that implements a robust BI architecture, establishing governance and technology standards. You can reference G2 reviews for the best analytics platforms to learn what actual users like and dislike about the software and make an informed purchase decision.
When choosing a self-service BI software for your business, you need a clear expectation of the desired capabilities and features. Every organization works with BI differently, so their BI strategy is tailored for their unique needs.
Below are some standard parameters that help make a wise purchasing decision for your organization.
Look for software that your team can easily implement and maintain. Ensure all your data sources, such as data lakes, data warehouses, and other databases, can connect to the BI software through direct connections. In the absence of a direct connection, your IT and BI department should get involved to establish a custom connection.
Consider the time it takes to implement the software. You can browse reviews and documentation to get an idea of the time taken to create a dashboard after purchasing the software license.
Self-service BI tools should provide an intuitive interface and help non-technical users understand data. Check how easy it is to establish connections to new data sources and independently manage business users.
Ensure users with no prior knowledge of structured query language (SQL) can query data and create data visualizations or dashboards. Confirm that these dashboards are easy to share and facilitate collaboration.
You should get a substantial return on investment (ROI) after purchasing self-service BI tools. Ensure that the software solution offers flexible pricing that suits teams of different sizes. Avoid signing long-term contracts with the vendor. As your business grows, your needs and expectations from the BI platform might change.
Your self-service BI software should scale with your growing business. Check whether the software can create custom tables and schemas to adapt to your business needs. Schema Make sure you have control over who gets access to specific data types. As you scale, it’s important to maintain control and governance to support data security.
Schema: A structured framework representing a plan in form of an outline or model.
Based on the above parameters, make your decision to purchase a self-service BI software that best fits your business needs.
Analytics platforms, also known as business intelligence platforms, help businesses strategize with actionable insights gleaned from absorbing, organizing, and analyzing data. Analysts, data scientists, and other business stakeholders use this software to understand business performance and make optimal decisions.
To qualify for inclusion in the self-service analytics platforms software list, a product must:
*This list is based on G2 data collected on December 20, 2021. Some reviews may have been edited for clarity.
Tableau Desktop allows users to connect to data on-premise or in the cloud – whether it’s big data, an SQL database, a spreadsheet, or cloud apps like Google Analytics and Salesforce. It enables unified access to disparate data siloed across an enterprise.
“Tableau is one of the best tools at our disposal. The amount and intricacy of the data that I’m able to gather via Tableau is unmatched. I use Tableau almost every day to gather data about my accounts and it allows me to choose the timeframe for the data, as well.”
- Tableau Desktop Review, Connor S.
“It has a steep learning curve, where proper skill sets truly matter. I wouldn't recommend it for the uninitiated. It requires a full data brief so you don’t get lost down all of the options available. When working in the online version it can also be quite slow – something we're working on.”
- Tableau Desktop Review, Abe B.
Qlik Sense offers modern analytics that empowers users at all skill levels to uncover insights and trigger actions when it matters. It allows users to create flexible and interactive visualizations that lead to meaningful decisions.
“This product has many features and the self-service makes it easy to get the information quickly. Interactive dashboards are another benefit businesses can use to make decisions. Search-based visual analysis chart types allow users to generate insights using Insight Advisor auto-generating visualizations to control correlation and cluster charts.”
- Qlik Sense Review, David M.
“Qlik doesn't have a public portal for anyone to expose their projects, so I can't share my dashboards and access another project. I think it was the best way to improve the techniques to solve and use data in a better way.”
- Qlik Sense Review, Pedro B.
Looker is a business intelligence software and big data analytics platform that helps users explore, analyze, and share real-time business analytics. It helps teams create dashboards in real time for in-depth and consistent analysis, enhancing reporting.
“Looker is designed to work seamlessly with standard software engineering practices. It strikes a good balance because you can fully build your dashboards from source, but you can also build and edit dashboards interactively. Looker is highly configurable and customizable, so whatever it is you need to do, chances are you can do it. ”
- Looker Review, Paul T.
“Some custom queries that are easy to make in SQL are complicated in Looker. We get through this issue by creating views and tables in our database; however, if you have a lot of complex and custom queries, it can take a while to tackle them all.
There are some pending cosmetic issues and advanced features we're lacking, but last time we checked, the development team was aware and working on them.”
- Looker Review, Francisco V.
Microsoft Power BI Desktop helps users save time and makes data prep easier with modeling tools. It enables teams to dig deeper into data and find patterns they may have otherwise missed, leading to actionable insights.
“I’ve used many visualizations and analytics tools, but Microsoft Power BI Desktop stands out. It offers almost the same or more functionalities as other tools, but with a much easier user interface. Since I work at a telecommunication firm, my daily work includes working with statistical data, analysis, and visualization – and Microsoft Power BI Desktop offers that functionality.”
- Microsoft Power BI Desktop Review, Adnan A.
“The software keeps advancing its features and training orientation would enrich active users like us. Training would be beneficial for all kinds of business users to be abreast with new functionality and features time and again.”
- Microsoft Power BI Desktop Review, Shrinkhala S.
Domo enables users to connect to any data source and bring all data together into one unified view. It provides analytics that drive insight-based actions – all while maintaining security and control.
“Domo helps us collect data from other tools and manage them in the same environment. We use it to feed our CRM, databases, and make viable decisions based on the reports it provides. Its interface is quite intuitive and customer service has been responsive when we need it.”
- Domo Review, Brad M.
“It's extremely complicated in some areas and the step-by-step guides don't show everything. I wish there was a chat option to talk with a specialist when we want someone to help us create our work.”
- Domo Review, Nicole W.
Adopt self-service BI software and empower business users to make sense of data. This will reduce the friction non-technical users face in accessing and analyzing data and minimize their dependency on IT and BI teams.
This allows IT departments to concentrate on critical IT and security tasks, making it a win-win for all. The data analysis process speeds up with self-service BI, enabling you to leverage recent insights and gain a competitive advantage.
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