Self Service BI: a paradigm shift
Self Service "BI" (business intelligence) is one of the biggest technology trends this year. In this blog, I'd like to explain why this is more than just a trend - and why it's something that can provide a competitive advantage within a department, a business unit, an organization and an industry.
In the traditional sense, BI is composed of an IT gatekeeper who architects and maintains a data warehouse through development (sorting, querying and blending data, defining facts and dimensions, creating cubes), testing, deployment (report server, access groups, policies, documentation), analysis (creating measures, defining parameters) and performing enhancements (DB upgrades, system maintenance, end-user requests). The business accesses these insights in a very controlled and decisive manner - commonly through reports or dashboards. The ability to perform ad-hoc analysis as well as share and collaborate on insights is typically quite limited. Furthermore, the ability to surface these or additional related insights within everyday analysis and collaboration is hampered by a high level of technical knowledge required to author, blend, query and design these reporting solutions. The result of this work is typically a BI tool that may be architected beautifully from a technical perspective but a solution with big gaps between actual insights, foundational business knowledge and agility. Often, the solution is unable to answer business questions in a timely manner - again due to the relative technical black box that is traditional BI. While IT may be very technically capable, it is the business that struggles to adopt these robust and extensible BUT expensive, cumbersome and "code heavy" reporting solutions.
Enter "Self Service" BI.
The concept is that business intelligence - too often considered an IT concentric function is being put back into the hands of functional users of this data. This in turn gives business users the ability to access the depth of information available them in a more agile fashion. In the same strategy, IT shifts from the traditional creation, setup, management, development and deployment of BI to a more strategic role in which BI itself enables the business via IT oversight, technical know-how and strategic initiatives. The questions shift from "When can I get 'XYZ' report?" to "What do these insights mean," "How can we better 'ABC'," "Let's discuss how we can better monetize 'DEF' customer segment," to "What will we do to better understand our 'GHI?'" At a macro level - self service BI is all about breaking down the traditional data silos and helping data better drive the business for ALL departments and divisions within an organization.
This shift in ideology was well explained and illustrated by Gartner. Below I've included screenshots of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI and Analytics for the past two years (2015 and 2016).
Credit: Gartner
Additionally, check out this visualization for the Gartner magic quadrant for the past 9 years, courtesy of Fredrik Hedenstrom:
Credit: Fredrik Hedenstrom - via www.fredrikhedenstrom.com
What's going on here? Essentially a mass exodus of the leaders and legacy software vendors. Gartner believes that the industry is facing a paradigm shift. As companies continue to become exceedingly more data-driven, they are looking for solutions that allow the business - from analysts to business analysts to managers, directors and C-level personnel - access to effective data insights. IT then enables this process. A self Service BI feature set is the new lens through which all vendors are now being assessed, scored and ranked for their respective capabilities.
One thing you'll notice quickly is how much the vendor landscape has evolved in just 1 short year. Many legacy players have been shifted. Well known solutions such as IBM Cognos have been substituted for their self service analytics cousins. IBM's Watson Analytics, for example, replaces the well known traditional Cognos BI solution. You'll note that Watson Analytics is a relatively young and perhaps even immature offering from IBM in this new industry. As such, IBM is just one such legacy vendor that has seen a market "realignment" within this new space.
I encourage you to read their detailed reports for both years to get a better perspective of their rationale and their predictions for where the market is heading:
2015 Gartner Report: https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-2AD8O9T&ct=150223&st=sb
2016 Gartner Report: https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-2XXET8P&ct=160204&st=sb
Today, everything generates data:
- Your customers
- Your employees
- Your operational systems
- Your business applications
- Your social media feeds
- Your customer's social media feeds
- Your competitors
- Substitute goods
- Complimentary goods
- New entrants to the market
- The economy
- ...The list goes on
These complex "variables" all factor into how your organization does business today in some form or fashion. All in all we are talking about quantitative data - facts and measures - but also more qualitative data such as reviews, opinions, customer reactions and sentiment. These talking points might lead to business systems, spreadsheets, text files, databases and more with a colossal amount of information. How would you ever glean insights without a scalable, accessible, powerful yet intuitive way to access this information?
Indeed, once you have access to the data sources, you'll need to read them, blend your structured (read - databases) and unstructured (read - Excel) datasets, apply appropriate calculations and then begin to cross filter, sort and query your data. You'll want a system that can automate these steps too and produce something you can easily consume and analyze - based on your business rules, logic and terminology. This is where the best self service BI tools excel as software that can take repetitive work away and automate cumbersome processes but enable you with deep processing power and analytics.
The best companies look at this data for metrics and KPIs (key performance indicators) to benchmark, monitor and underscore their performance in the market. They compare their relative strategy in the market to these forces and adapt and change dynamically. They are agile. They are responsive. They understand where they need to act and how. And they can quickly understand the effects of changes to these forces. In sum they are empowered not only from an individual but a team, department, business unit and organizational level. Data can now become a tool - and not just information stuck in a silo.
Self Service BI can be foundational to any data driven, agile business strategy. Say you want to compare competitive product offerings from a price and sales perspective within your specific sales territories. Perhaps you want to create a predictive model to forecast new product sales with legacy customers based on their buying history and demographics. Maybe you want to analyze customer sentiment for your legacy service offering to better inform its direction and road map. You need tools to do this work - but also a clearly defined vision and next steps. What will you do once you garner these insights? How will you adapt or maintain? These questions are in fact more critical than the first. Understand what is and why only help you assess your current strategy. You'll still be on the hook to empower and enlighten the business strategy and direction but now perhaps your decisions can be more adequately driven by data and the underlying forces that created it. These types of questions coupled with the right tools and vision can lead to competitive insights in this new, digital age.
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