A State-of-The-Art Overview and Future Research Avenues

for Self-Service Business Intelligence and Analytics

ECIS 2020
Sven Michalczyk, Mario Nadj, Darius Azarfar, Alexander Mädche, Christoph Gröger
INSTITUTE OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS AND MARKETING (IISM)
RESEARCH GROUP INFORMATION SYSTEMS AND SERVICE DESIGN (ISSD)

KIT – The Research University in the Helmholtz Association

www.kit.edu
 Business Intelligence & Analytics (SSBIA)

…encourages users to prepare, analyze and consume data on their own, with nominal IT
support (based on Gartner IT Glossary, 2019; Lennerholt et al., 2018)
“empower casual users to perform analytics” and “power users can accomplish their task
[…] more easily and quickly than before”. (Alpar & Schulz 2016)
Addresses the challenge to support different user roles with diverse levels of expertise
for various analytical demands ranging from (1) information usage, (2) over information
creation, (3) towards information resource creation (Alpar & Schulz 2016).

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 Motivation
Size of the Global BIA Market (BARC, 2019)
▪ Adoption of SSBIA is challenging due to technical 35 29,84
or organizational boundaries (Logi 2017) 30

Billionen US. $
25
▪ Vast number of studies requires structuration 20 15,64
15
▪ Lack of a systematic approach to illustrate the 10
state of-the-art along the various characteristics of 5
0
SSBIA
2016 2022
▪ Although some scholars sketched out SSBIA
Number of SSBIA
challenges (e.g., Lennerholt et al., 2018) future Related Scientific Publications
25
reserach needs more guidance to be well-directed 20
20

15

Count
What are the potential avenues in 10 8
6 7 6
SSBIA for future research? 5
1 1 2 2 1
3 4

0
2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019

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 Systematic Literature Review
Following Webster and Watson (2002), Kitchenham and Charters (2007)

Search String Hit Statistics

1 “Self*Service” AND ( Step 2.1: Search (# 809) WebOfScience (# 203)

Scopus (# 472)
IEEE (# 132)
2 “Business Intelligence” OR “Analytic*” arXiv & SSRN (# 2)

3 OR “Information System*” OR “Decision Support System*” Study title & abstract (#58)
Step 2.2: Select (#60)
4 OR “Machine Learning” OR Study full text (#49)

5 “Data” AND (“Understanding” OR “Cleaning” OR Step 2.3: Extract / Analyze Forward/backward (#60)

“Preparation” OR “Integration” OR “Wrangling” OR

“Modeling” OR “Mining” OR
“Discovery” OR “Exploration” OR “Visualization”)

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 Conceptual Framework
De Mauro et al., 2018;
1 Lismont et al., 2019 1 Alpar & Schulz, 2016 2
Classification Process
Self-Service
1.
1 Derived deductivley from User Role Experience Perspective
Levels
existing literature
Usage of
2.
2 Cross-validate existing Casual User Novice Information Artifact-Centric
Ressources
codes or create new ones
Creation of
3.
3 Assign codes Power User Expert
Information
User-Centric

independently by two
researchers and resolve Creation of
Governance-
IT-User 2 Information
Centric
conflicts Resources
3

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 User Roles
77%
Casual User
Business User & Domain Experts
Solely consume data
(monitoring of dashboards,
preparing reports)
Scares analytical but extensive
business or engineering
knowledge (Spahn et al., 2008)
Naturally develop a data-driven
mindset over time supported by
a ontology to learn BIA-related
knowledge (Englmeier & Román,
2014)
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Power User
68%
Data Analyst
Responsible for transforming
data into actionable
insights for casual users
(Eckerson, 2012)
Distinguished by data
production (clean and
aggregate data, De Mauro et
al., 2018) and data
consumption tasks (analyze
ML outputs; Dinsmore, 2016)
Unlike DS, often bound to a
department (Eckerson,
2012)
37%
Data Scientist
Less business and domain
knowledge (Eckerson, 2012)
Structured, unstructured,
internal and external data
(Abelló et al., 2013)
Applying advanced analytics
(identifying patterns, applying
context and intelligence; De
Mauro et al., 2018)
Institute of Information Systems and Marketing (IISM)
18%
IT User
Engineers & Developers
Providing necessary data
infrastructure (e.g. data
streams via pipelines), thus
act as enabler (De Mauro et
al., 2018, Zehnder & Riemer,
2018)
Mgt. and governance of data
(Bilalli et al., 2016)
Implementation of data-
intensive systems (Eckerson,
2012)
 Perspectives 82%

45%
25%

Artefact-centric View User-centric View Governance-centric

Continuous interaction without any
mediation or intervention (Abelló et al.
2013),
I.e. Fusion Cubes or
Semantic query designer tool (Spahn
et al. 2008)
Leverage ML by a domain-specific
language (Zehnder and Riemer 2018)
Aim to make casual user more
knowledgable (Imhoff & White, 2011)
Implementation of information levels
(data consumptions tasks, data
production tasks, user profiles,
availability; Alpar & Schulz, 2016)
Multi-tool, multi-user platform to create
synergies between casual and power
user (Convertino & Echenique)
Data Lakes (typically not fully IT-
curated) become an important direct
source for SSBIA (Llave,2018; Vo et. al.,
2018),
Data quality needs to be sufficient for
the analytical task (Stodder, 2015).
Crowd-sourced annotation systems
may rate the value of reports and data
sources (Imhoff & White, 2011).
Too strict governance leads to shadow
IT infrastructure built up by business
departments (Stodder, 2015).

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 Self-Service Levels
(1) Usage of Information (2) Creation of (3) Creation of Information Ressources
Resources Information
77%
67%
52% 57%
47%
28%
18%

Access to Reports Access to Drill Creation of Access to Creation of Harnessing of Deployment of

"Anywhere"
Reporting
Acces to reports requires the lowest
level of self-reliance and system
support from casual users (Alpar &
Schulz, 2016).
Sharing and collbaboration are
important system features
(Marjanovic, 2015)
Technical solutions to drill-down and
roll-up anywhere functionalities
(Chouder et al., 2017).
Reports Analytical
Functions
Data access and availability are a
key concern for information creation
(Berthold et al., 2017).
Because power user are scares in the
market, causal user should be
enabled through SSBIA to fit models
(Dinsmore, 2016). Model
management warehouses could
ensure reuse of pre trained models
(Chard et al., 2019).
Mashups New Data Analytical
Sources Functions
Creation of Mashups refers to various data
preparation tasks. SSBIA should give users the
autonomy to explore and integrate new data in
structured and unstructured formats (Bani-Hani et
al., 2018).
Learned statistical models can only create value if
they are integrated into business processes. For
e.g. , more technical roles may deploy analytical
functions to enable casual users to leverage ML
(Zehnder and Riemer, 2018).

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 Future Research Avenues

1 Understand the Trade-Off between Top-Down and Bottom-Up SSBIA Capabilities

2 Define a Method for Implementing SSBIA within Organizations

3 Investigate Success Factors for Data Management and Data Governance

4 Support Casual Users‘ Self-Reliance within the Analytical Investigation Process

5 Develop Effective Multi Sensory User Interfaces for Immersive Collaboration Environments

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 Vielen Dank für Ihre Aufmerksamkeit!

Many thanks for your attention!

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