Considering Self-Service Business Intelligence

In Gartner’s 2015 Q1 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms report you find that the 10 top suites have the same essential functionality, but they differ in the nuances where they focus in certain areas. Sometimes it comes down to preferences, previous experience, license costs, and what resources are available to implement and maintain the suite that can become decision makers.

Yes the business community desires to have a self-service Business Intelligence (BI) environment so that they do not need to wait for BI development from the technology team. This enables a faster process in creating the information necessary for faster decision making by the business team.

Some of the steps to arrive at the promised land of Self-Service Business Intelligence include:

1. Strong partnership with the business team so that they can better understand the data and their informational requirements.
2. Working with the business team to create and maintain a Business Semantical Glossary of terminology and definitions, especially focused the Self-Service requirements. This would be a component of Business Metadata.
3. Work at defining the Self-Service requirements and documenting the calculations and KPIs that the business needs and uses.
4. Plan on the data elements that are needed to define in the targeted self-service BI packages.
5. Work with the business team to define the BI Semantical names for the self-service BI packages and link them to the Business Semantical Glossary.
6. Create and maintain the data lineage of the data necessary to deliver self-service BI packages. Document the BI Semantical names as part of the Business Metadata.
7. Design the Staging and Reporting schemas that support Self-Service BI.
8. Create and the ETL workflows to cleanse, transform, and deliver the data from staging to a reporting layer optimized for fast processing.
9. Create documentation and train the business team utilizing Self-Service in the Enterprise BI tool of choice that provides various delivery methods of:
   1. Ad-hoc queries
   2. Data Discovery
   3. Dashboards
   4. Reports
   5. Visualizations
10. Define work sessions with the business team to perform the Self-Service BI and produce some needed deliverables to jump start their process.
11. Go back to another iteration of step 2, because Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence is a never ending, continuous process of producing high value from data assets. The BI Iceberg shows that discovering, cleaning, preparing, and loading the data is the hard work that can take up to 80% of the time and effort to deliver Self-Service BI.  As the iterations continue to be executed, the business and IT teams will increase the velocity of producing actionable information and increase its value.

The journey to provide strong value from data assets is available to the organizations that commitment to empower the business teams to utilize focused information that they create via self-service options to make the decisions that impact greater operational performance. Your move...