Glen Rabie at Yellowfin makes a good point that self-service BI is an oxymoron evidenced in the dashed dreams of disappointed business users.
Business users who, tired of waiting for central IT to reconfigure complex semantic layers, used revenue budgets to license small projects with Qlik and Tableau. Attracted by the promise of self-service BI, data discovery, In quick time they present beautiful visualisations in impressive dashboards and everyone believes the new insights.
Then other business leaders license similar products and get different results and they start arguing about "who has the right data?" Which highlights the weakness of many "self-service BI" claims.
Business, operational and front-line users rarely have the time or skills to source relevant data never mind prepare it. Even if they could, they are prone to the mistake of mistaking cause and effect. Drawing false conclusions from incomplete, variable quality data.
Then when they try and scale this across business units and enterprises it just compounds the issues.
As Glen points out the data issue is key and curated data is one solution. See
"Failing to see desired ROI from analytics & BI?"
Unless this is tackled self-service BI is a misnomer if not a lie
In the simplest terms possible, we have terrible adoption rates because the industry is selling a product built for data analysts to millions of unwilling and unwanting business users. Marketing BI as “self-service” is the fundamental lie of the industry.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/self-service-biggest-lie-bi-glen-rabie
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