The Business Case of Self-service BI

Why Self-service BI makes a difference? If we look at the state of BI before, then the answer is quite clear.

• Only trained and highly-paid BI developers can be used to create BI applications, which is highly customized (which means cost of maintenance, further development, and even decommissioning).

• After BI application is built, it becomes difficult (money, time) to implement changes even the business situations and requirements are changed.

• After having 5 different BI applications, you have to have people with specific skills and knowledge to the ground level of these applications. Each system works in its own way. (so what's the cost of maintenance and operating)
• Since it costs too much, many business analysts start to copy data from production systems and make their own analysis from local PCs. Spreadmarts become popular. Everyone becomes a cowboy and key business decisions are made from some charts in a spreadsheet saved at some one's local PC.
• When people are trying to share the spreadsheet files, the whole business is having the risk of losing confidential data without being aware of it.

Given these scenarios, starting a self-service BI can definitely eliminate the above scenarios by bringing lower cost, shorter time-to-market, reduced IT investment, more precise requirement specifications for corporate BI solutions, and more efficient collaborations among the business users.

To be a bit more specific, here is a few points demonstrating the benefits claimed above.

First, most self-service BI tools start by extending Excel or providing a very easy-to-start interface so that the business users always find it simple and quick to start producing reports, sometimes just like what they have been doing with Excel. And self-service BI means the business users have to serve themselves to produce the end result. There is almost no intervention from IT side, not to mention any "waiting time," "resource bottleneck," etc. This dramatically reduce the development cost for many BI solutions at the business team.

Second, since the development of the BI solutions is at the hand of business users, there is absolutely no communication detour between business-IT-business in order to get most work done. Shorter time-to-market  is ensured since the one who needs it is the one who builds it. Who else to complain about it?

Third, the role of IT in this scenario is to monitor the business work and observe the need for creating corporate BI solutions (which is more reliable in terms of maintenance and operation). What's more important is that after doing these many self-service BI solutions, the business is actually making a very excellent prototype for the potential BI solutions that can benefit more. This saved quite much time of requirement analysis, interviews, escalations and much effort made by the solution architects at every project.

Forth, the concept, which is also a key in many self-service BI solution, is that self-service BI must include a collaborative effort to ensure the communications and reusability among the business team and the IT team. This avoids the spreadmart scenario and in fact, provides a chance to maximize the benefit of solutions developed by the power users at the business team.

Oh, one last point to make. What happens to the corporate BI solutions when self-service BI becomes so popular. The answer is, "nothing." We still need corporate BI solution and we still need to develop these solutions through IT and business corporations. But, the difference is, we've got a better overview of what we need and what we want this time ;)