Lest one forgets- the purpose of BI and analytics is often stated as "to  let people make better decisions based on complete data". There is always that damning phrase however " It's all very good in theory but in practice it sucks!"

That points out two major gaps in many BI and Analytics projects

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1) Divorcing decision-making from decision execution. 

2) Omitting line of business people from analytics  leaving it to data scientists and analysts far removed from the front line. 

Don't divorce analytics from enterprise apps.

Unless analytics are deeply embedded in enterprise applications they lack practicality. Forcing operational users into separate tabs ,or worse still free-standing analytics apps, means people will not use them effectively- if at all. 

Analytics should be an intuitive step in the right part of all work flows meaning that users don't have to think about where they are. they are there when they need them. Better still proactively alerting of changes for good or bad so staff can anticipate problems and exploit opportunities.

Omitting line of business people a mistake

The nearer you devolve decision-making to the area of impact the better. So LOB staff should be able to experience self-service analytics to customise the analytics to the priorities of the day and month. To be able to combine expert knowledge and best practice with analytics.

In the past that may have lead to anarchy- the classic silos of information; people isolated using different data and always arguing about the data rather than the analysis.

So insist that all self-service BI is based on scalable and secure BI & Analytics platforms for the best of all worlds.

Click on Secure and Scalable Self-Service Analytics