A major report states that a majority of IT respondents ( and a decent sized survey) have or will deploy data discovery and self-service solutions. But then concludes that user adoption is declining!

I have seen this anecdotally in large enterprises. Business unit leaders disagree with the legacy BI reporting as presented fact/dashboards differ from their experience. So they license some beautiful looking new tool with self-service to prove they can do better.

This approach does not tackle the flaw of many BI systems- the time gap between the reported views and current status. Business users complain and ignore corporate BI & Reporting

A second issue is that self-service BI often compounds traditional problems of:- 

  • Being difficult to use
  • Data silos & comparing apples with pears
  • Business users
    • Seeing spurious correlations
    • Particularly if they support users "big ideas"
    • Making bad  decisions
  • Driving coach & horses through security/user admin 
  • Gap widens between Business user & IT/Analysts

Result- self-service usage declines

To be successful, 

  1. Self-service BI must be usable and accessible across all users from analysts to humble consumer of standard KPI dashboards & reports.
  2. Must bridge the gap between central IT and the business user.
  3. Join, access & analyse disparate data sources
  4. Will only be of use if seen in the context of the regular work processes and flow of the end user.
  5. Must be easy to use by busy line of business staff.

The optimal way to meet these often contradictory aims is to deeply embed BI & Analytics.

  • In the widely deployed enterprise apps
    • Internal built
    • Licensed from ISVs/SaaS Providers
  • On the security/user admin models maintained by central IT

Very few vendors meet these criteria for enterprise strength embedded analytics. Amongst those that do you'll find:-

  • Information Builders
  • Logi Analytics
  • Cognos
  • Business Objects
  • Board

Another way to look at this is to investigate business transformation platforms like 360Globalnet with embedded analytics. 

You'll also find specialist vendors like Carto in the Location Intelligence Space.

Follow the link below to read the report alongside Butler, Gartner, Forrester, Aberdeen, Dresner et al