Published on May 8th, 2020 | by Sunit Nandi

Self-Service Business Intelligence and Why it is So Essential Today

Self-service BI is empowering organizations that are looking to enable fact-based smart decisions across their businesses. Business users tend to adopt a data-driven approach faster in a self-service environment than otherwise. Various business users in an organization have a variety of analytics needs. Self-service BI platforms enable all users to interact easily with their organization data based on their roles.

The current Covid-19 or Coronavirus pandemic has introduced distributed working systems across the globe. In such difficult times, for businesses to keep running successfully, it has become imperative for organizations to adopt self-service ways of working. Monitoring and assessing business operations, staff, other developments sitting at your homes that too in real-time is evidently more feasible with self-service analytics in place.

Instant Reports Support Quick Decision Making

Self-service BI ensures lesser time to daily insights and reduces the average time taken in the report development life cycle considerably. In a traditional system, it usually takes 1 to 8 months to create and update reports if a platform lacks self-service capabilities. Self-service allows business users to perform tasks such as creation, alteration, and modification of reports, dashboards, and more with ease. This enables users to derive actionable insights and answer critical business questions without delay due to long report development cycles.

Makes Machine Learning and Predictive Analytics Accessible

Self-service BI brings the power of Data Science and Machine Learning based analytics in every business user’s hand. Ad hoc reporting helps you perform predictive analytics on your current data and get potential outcomes that can help you in strategizing the future and take the corrective action. Users can do multiple things such as predict potential sales for the coming quarter, identify behavior patterns, detect fraud and prevent it from happening, forecast inventory and potential production unit failure, recognize consumer behavior and pattern to optimize targeting and sales, prevent attrition, improve patient care and much more. Users can also do What-if analysis easily with few clicks and know, how potential future numbers (dependent variable) fluctuates as you change the value of your independent variables.

Data Democratization is Easier

In a self-service environment, business users irrespective of their departments can create reports or dashboards in simple steps without any dependencies. They can then easily collate and collaborate their findings and generate everyday reports and dashboards as a single version of truth. This level of data democratization helps in data-driven, informed decision making across all levels of business operations.

Provides Opportunities to Innovate

Self-service analytics brings data analytics right into the hands of business users. Business users can perform tasks like data exploration, visualization, reporting that too in real-time. With modern BI platforms, business users can even perform complex tasks like machine-learning-based analytics, predictive analysis, what-if analysis in simple steps. With this, trained data analysts and data science experts can then focus on innovative and scientific ways to increase productivity and strategic development. Adding immense value to the organization and business improvement.

Conclusion

To stay ahead of the curve, adopting self-service analytics can be a good addition to your business operations. With facts available at fingertips, business users can be more strategic and confident in taking critical business decisions. This will result in enhanced operations, improved productivity, and business ROI. Based on their roles, your users will find it easy to interact with the self-service BI platforms to derive optimum value for your analytics investment. Ad hoc reporting is certainly is the right way to the future, as it is equally impactful at the senior-most level of an organization as well as at the field level where an employee can see how his operations are impacting the company. This ultimately paves the way to a future where every decision at every level is driven by data and not just intuitions.

Tags: BI, business intelligence, essential, self-service

About the Author

Sunit Nandi I'm the leader of Techno FAQ. Also an engineering college student with immense interest in science and technology. Other interests include literature, coin collecting, gardening and photography. Always wish to live life like there's no tomorrow.