Self-service Business Intelligence Tools: Within The Gartner Magic Quadrant Choice Procedure – As the volume of business data continues to grow, it is important for companies to focus their efforts on data management and its analysis with the help of business intelligence, which is designed to help entrepreneurs gain insights from past performance, predict future events and avoid obstacles even before they occur. Investing in and using tools that can generate quality business insights has experienced long-term growth, regardless of the economic cycle. This has accelerated in recent years as businesses seek data to not only grow and develop, but also to manage their day-to-day businesses.
The times when online BI was only applied by large enterprises due to the complexity, costs and skills required are long gone. Today small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are becoming significant consumers of BI. To stand out from the competition, reduce costs, and increase profits, a company must make smart decisions. To do this, these decisions must be logically based on reliable and relevant data, and this is precisely what makes BI useful. As applications, tools, and software become more affordable, the introduction of self-service business intelligence (SSBI) has made deep analysis easier to use, so everyone on the team can participate.
Self-service Business Intelligence Tools: Within The Gartner Magic Quadrant Choice Procedure
These ideas will be the main focus of our article. We will explain what self-service business intelligence is, provide an overview and comparison between traditional and self-service BI, list the most popular benefits, and explain what the tools used in BI to produce valid business results. Finally, we’ll present best practices you can follow to get the best possible value and organize your adoption in the most efficient way.
Self Service Bi Tools
Self-service business intelligence refers to the processes, tools, and software that companies use to empower business users to select, filter, compare, visualize, and analyze data one, without requiring special and advanced IT training.
At any given point in the analysis process, the actual decision makers have all the power and possibility to connect the data, perform the analysis, create visualizations or reports, and share their results. The analysis itself may vary based on the immediate needs of the information consumer when performing this process. In the background, an intelligent abstraction layer translates your interactions into database queries, supported by powerful proprietary analytical engines. Then you can make your data readable by turning it into meaningful visualizations. The resulting charts and tables can be easily shared via a dynamic KPI dashboard, meaning anyone in your company can view, understand and participate in the data capture process – not just a trained IT or analyst department. The best self-service BI tools will also offer predictive analytics models within the software where you can easily find the data based on the analysis you need to compile.
Traditionally, the entire process was done by technical and analytics professionals while business users were only tasked with setting the requirements for the reports and data that needed to be analyzed. Let’s see how it changed.
Access to data is in the hands of IT, data scientists and analysts. Control, manipulation, capture and reporting are in the hands of a few people in a company who can work with data warehouses, write SQL queries, and analyze large volumes of data. Often, companies have never had the opportunity to use someone to work with their information, and all the tools they can afford are in the form of spreadsheets and static presentations. In recent years, things have changed dramatically and software solutions have developed so quickly that everyone in a company can generate their own actionable insights. Let’s explore the differences between traditional BI and the self-service approach:
Wat Is Selfservice Bi En Wat Zijn De Voordelen?
A) Who needs what? Traditionally, business users would set up business requirements for generating a report or dashboard. Here is where their involvement almost stalls and the IT department takes over the rest of the process. The project/report must be approved, and, later, the data is ready for extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) into the data warehouse. The IT or BI department develops the report or business dashboard while business users do not have any control over this process. On the other hand, in a self-service setting, business users don’t need to be tech-savvy to process data on their own. The IT team works closely with users’ requests to select the best possible tool, but analysis, reporting, and dashboard creation are completely under user control. Additionally, the self-service features provide different possibilities based on the level of knowledge a professional needs, so a common user and the IT specialist can work with the same tool.
B) Who loads the data and where? Retrieving and loading data into a warehouse is mostly automatic, but in a traditional setting, the IT department is responsible for retrieving data from the warehouse by writing SQL queries to generate reports. On the other hand, in a self-service setting, business users access the data directly and have complete control over analysis, creating reports or dashboards. In a traditional setting, the entire analysis process is set up and controlled by IT, but self-service allows the user to control the process with the help of a self-service BI software. Although they have to collaborate on some of the data preparation steps, business users are enabled to assist the IT department and relieve the burden of many of their tasks.
C) Who created the report or dashboard? Modern business intelligence software often consists of an intuitive, drag-and-drop interface, based on user-friendly navigation that allows non-technical professionals to build their own queries and generate comprehensive reports. In a traditional BI setting, this is done by IT professionals while the business user approves or requests changes to the report or dashboard. This process can take several weeks, and often the IT department is already too busy with many other tasks. Generating reports has become a tedious task that no one enjoys. In recent years, common business users have gained the ability to build their own analysis, ad hoc reports, explore data and interact with dashboards with the help of multiple visualizations. The process has become so simple that the IT department no longer needs to have full control over a company’s business intelligence. Business users can take full advantage of self-service reporting tools and self-serve data.
Traditional vs. modern BI has a different way of operating within a company, but the goal is the same: actionable insights. Businesses must consider the budget, workforce, and tools they can afford and maintain to choose the best possible solution. We will now focus on the benefits of self-service business intelligence (SSBI) and follow the most prominent elements that these tools offer.
Best Self Service Bi Tools For Everyday Marketers
A) Answer critical questions in seconds: Gone are the days of asking for a critical KPI and having to wait hours, if not days, for a busy IT department to get the report. SSBI puts the user in control of the data. Data is instantly accessible for real-time analysis and immediate actionable insights, giving your team a competitive advantage.
B) Integrate multiple data sources: Comprehensive business intelligence often requires integrating multiple data sources and performing cross-database queries. From online to offline data, a user-friendly SSBI setup will allow you to aggregate and analyze every type of data available in one central place.
C) Excel just doesn’t cut it: When you can’t access the data you need it’s still common for users to shortcut their data management processes to get quick answers. Excel is a common go-to tool for short cuts. A 2011 study by Forrester showed that 88 percent of users rely “extremely” or “exclusively” on spreadsheets. It was clear that the old BI style was not meeting their needs. While 2011 was a few years ago, it’s safe to assume that in 2020 the number will still be high, especially when it comes to ad hoc analysis. Although Excel was never intended to be a BI tool, it can be tempting to rely on spreadsheets for workflow from familiarity. Relying on Excel is a risky proposition because it requires a lot of manual data entry, making it prone to errors, especially when spreadsheets are passed around your organization. Gone are the days of exporting large datasets to spreadsheets to be converted into charts and pivot tables. With the new generation of Self-service BI tools, analyzing data within spreadsheets is a thing of the past.
D) Democratization of data: The whole team no longer has to rely on a data analyst looking at spreadsheets, looking for clues to improve services. Self-service BI tools provide information for everyone involved in the project in an easy-to-share format. Because all team members can easily access the same data, SSBI makes the decision-making process more inclusive, putting everyone involved in the decision-making process on the same page, allowing everyone an equal chance to impress the boss and customers.
Why Modern Business Intelligence Tools Have Failed To Deliver True Self Service
E) Mobile stuff: Business Intelligence means having the right data
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