The global self-service Business Intelligence (BI) market is anticipated to attain a CAGR of 16% over the forecast period of 2022 – 2031.
– Market Watch
The world today is governed by data. Progressive entrepreneurs are aware of the fact that prompt, data-based decision-making is imperative for running a business successfully. However, traditional Business Intelligence (BI) models no longer enable organizations to deliver leading-edge services to customers, predict future sales and demands, and stay ahead of the competition. They don’t empower business users with the deep insights they need to take efficiency to the next level. Instead, the traditional method forces business users to reach out to BI experts whenever they need to uncover insights. However, the BI experts have their own charters and are unable to provide a prompt turnaround for the BI requests. Self-service BI is delivering organizations with a great alternative to get over their roadblocks.
What is Self-Service BI?
Implementing Self-Service Business Intelligence (SSBI) and cloud-based BI solutions is a new-age solution that forward-looking organizations need. It is an approach to data analytics that enables business users to glean valuable insights and explore data sets even if they don’t have a background in BI or data mining etc., without intervention by BI experts.
Leveraging self-service BI capabilities, business users from executives to frontline workers get valuable insights from the data collected in multiple BI systems and make informed decisions that result in positive business outcomes. With self-service BI organizations can increase efficiency, enhance customer satisfaction, and increase revenue. These benefits make self-service BI a win-win for business users and IT departments.
What is the difference between Traditional BI and Self-Service BI?
Traditional BI tools are used for data analysis by BI teams or IT professionals, making the implementation resource-intensive. Conversely, a self-service BI is sort of a ready-to-use tool for power users. Some other key differentiators are listed below.
| Factors | Traditional BI | Self-Service BI |
|---|---|---|
| IT Setup | Completely IT-driven. It requires the constant involvement of IT and data specialists to implement and maintain the system. | Once it is implemented, it frees up the IT and BI teams to focus on other time-critical tasks. |
| Agility | Access to the BI tools is limited to IT personnel and data specialists, making it difficult for business users to get the insights whenever they need them. | Access is provided to business users to perform data analysis, generate reports, and get analytical insights in real-time. |
| Type of Data | Unstructured data is first transformed into structured data by IT personnel. | Data can be aggregated from multiple sources and transformed easily whenever needed. |
| Reporting Type | The reports generated are based on historical or current data present in the system. | Self-service tools can help with historical, predictive, and prescriptive reporting to enable business users to decide their next step forward. |
How does Self-Service BI can Accelerate Business Growth and Deliver a Competitive Advantage?
In addition to empowering the business users with valuable insights allowing them to make data-driven decisions with low technical knowledge, the adoption of self-service BI delivers multiple other benefits to organizations.
1: Make the most of BI and IT teams and resources
Leveraging self-service BI solutions, business users can uncover valuable insights from siloed tools and disparate data sources on their own. Thus, freeing BI and IT teams up to direct the majority of their attention away from queries related to data visualizations, dashboard, and report creation tasks to more strategic initiatives. This way, the teams can work on tasks requiring technical knowledge that is both time and business-critical.
2: Improved data analysis and faster decision-making
Enables business users to get the insights they require from massive amounts of data on their own whenever they need it. This ensures that they get accurate data on time, analyze it properly, accelerate business processes, make decisions faster, and perform actions proactively.
3: Accelerate the Business Intelligence journey
Such platforms not only empower executives and managers to work with analytical data to address their business challenges but also allow them to change existing (or even create new) reports and dashboards from scratch. Thus, helping them create an entirely data-driven culture in both the C-suite and business operations.
4: Competitive advantages
To keep up with the change, organizations need to be agile more than ever, and self-service analytics capabilities enable that dexterity. It allows businesses to utilize customers’ data much more efficiently and make decisions faster, giving them a competitive advantage over other competitors in the market.
How is Power BI helping organizations implement Self-Service BI?
Power BI, as a part of Microsoft 365, enables organizations to establish self-service BI. Power BI enables business users at every level of an organization to make confident decisions using up-to-the-minute analytics. It reduces the added cost, complexity, and security risks of implementing multiple BI solutions with its leading-edge features. Below we have enlisted how Power BI can help your organization to achieve the objectives of self-service BI and realize its benefits.
- Quick and easy access to data: Power BI can be easily integrated with Power Query and other third-party data sources, making it easier for users to aggregate relational, multi-dimensional, structured, or semi-structured data they need from multiple on-premises, cloud, or web data sources without involving IT or BI professionals.
- Customizable and collaborative user interface: Provides extensive reporting and dashboarding capabilities, which empower business users to visualize the data most relevant to them in the way they want whenever they need it. Users can customize their dashboard to have a personalized experience and analyze the data on any device.
- Easy-to-use and improved support for data analysis: The simple user interface of Power BI significantly reduces the learning curve for new users. Users can create reports and dashboards easily as the interface resembles that of Excel Power View or Pivot Tables. Additionally, users can also build sophisticated queries and data models with Power BI Designer to perform complex and in-depth analyses of data.
Regardless of which stage of the BI journey you are in, organizations can move forward with confidence and accelerate their business growth by leveraging Power BI as a self-service BI solution.
Driving Self-Service BI Success
As a Global Systems Integrator and Microsoft Gold Partner, AgreeYa can help organizations implement and succeed with Power BI. We have helped many organizations establish a culture of self-service BI, transform decision-making and gain a competitive edge with our Power BI services.
Recently, AgreeYa partnered with a government agency responsible for keeping creeks, rivers, estuaries, and bays of San Antonio safe, clean, and well maintained. We helped the agency build an automated business intelligence platform on Power BI to standardize the data reporting process and improve the quality of data-driven insights. Contact us to discuss your Business Intelligence requirements and let us help you implement a culture of Self-service BI.