The three principles of agile self-service BI
True agility happens when all these personas get the right level of analytical power and can work together in a well-defined collaborative environment. However, their intuition may be somewhat limited when it comes to which insights are actually useful for running your business. Or, more importantly, an engineer’s discipline when it comes to taking care of data quality, testing things out, and keeping them maintainable. The receptionist may not be the right person to create a sales forecast dashboard, and neither is the CEO she may have the knowledge but not the time.įinally, you have a data engineer or a data scientist who can crunch the data to get insights you never knew you might need. The lady from the marketing team may be on top of it when it comes to data flowing from digital marketing systems, but she may be a little lost about product telemetry. You may be literate with data to the point that you can create some promising prototypes, but you may easily miss a detail or two. Of course, not everyone is like you, and it’s for this reason that it’s good to start your self-service analytics efforts with user personas. You can still do some ad hoc reporting or data analysis, and you can prototype reports and dashboards that are worth sharing. With BI, the divide is more complicated.įor example, what if you are a user of a business analytics application who is somehow literate with data? You don’t have to be a BI developer or a data scientist. When you use Google to search the internet, it’s clear you are the user while the folks in Mountain View wearing t-shirts, jeans, and flip-flops are the developers.
SELF SERVICE BI TOOLS SOFTWARE
Unlike with the development of consumer software products, the distinction between business users and BI developers is blurry. In order to successfully implement modern BI it is important to distinguish how it differs from something like consumer software.
Yes, it can be a lightweight process, but you do need one.Īn agile analytics environment will give you the flexibility to roll-out a self-service BI tool that caters for your entire audience, be it internal teams, or external partners or customers. Please don’t take “Individuals and Interactions Over Processes and Tools” from the Agile Manifesto too literally. Business and technical people work together (this one requires some clarification in the context of BI and analytics - see below),
Most of them have a number of things in common: There are well-established agile methodologies adopted by the most famous software companies of today. The first step to achieving self-service BI is to strive for an agile analytics environment. Agility in analytics Agile analytics are an imperative in today’s market Unfortunately, while its definition is fairly straightforward, it is often easier said than done. In short, self-service business intelligence can be defined as allowing end-users without a technical background, or in-depth knowledge of data analytics, to access data and create or customize their own reports and analyses.
SELF SERVICE BI TOOLS HOW TO
Read on, to understand what self-service BI is, why it could be the right solution for your organization, and how to go about successfully implementing and achieving it. Self-service business intelligence (BI) is often touted as the answer to your data analytics needs, and while this may be the case, understanding what it is and how to achieve it should be your first task before pulling the trigger on an analytics solution.