Self-service business intelligence

The drive to make it possible for just about anyone to get useful information out of
business intelligence tools has given rise to self-service business intelligence, a
category of BI tools aimed at abstracting away the need for IT intervention in
generating reports. Self-service BI tools enable organizations to make the company's
internal data reports more readily available to managers and other nontechnical staff.

Among the keys to self-service BI success are business intelligence dashboards and

UIs that include pull-down menus and intuitive drill-down points that allow users to
find and transform data in easy-to-understand ways. A certain amount of training will
no doubt be required, but if the advantages of the tools are obvious enough,
employees will be eager to get on board. (If you're shopping for a self-service BI
solution, CIO.com’s Martin Heller walks you through the decision making
process and compares his top five choices.)

Keep in mind, though, that there are pitfalls to self-service BI as well. By steering

your business users into becoming ad hoc data engineers, you can end up with a
chaotic mix of metrics that vary across departments, run into data security problems,
and even run up big licensing or SaaS bills if there's no centralized control over tool
rollout. So even if you are committing to self-service business intelligence within your
organization, you can't just buy an off-the-shelf product, point your staff to the UI,
and hope for the best.