5 Tips for Self-Service Business Intelligence Success

Businesses have been trending to use self-service models and course with any new trend or change there will be obstacles and challenges. There will be business professionals who haven’t used a software tool since starting out at the associate level that will be very apprehensive to utilizing a BI tool. Then of course, there will be business professionals who want to get more involved in handling the tool and selecting reporting criteria. However, I’ve certainly seen more of the former. Self-service for business intelligence will see it’s growing pains and business unites and IT departments need to learn how to manage this transition smoothly. Here are some tips to consider for successful implementation of a self-service BI model.

Performance and reward

It’s my belief that how a company rewards an employee for a new responsibility/role is the most important and most overlooked part of successful implementation of a BI self-service model. Employees already have an overflowing plate of responsibilities and it’s important to match up productivity with rewards. In addition, business managers must include performance reviews around self-service BI with clear objectives because it’s too easy to push it off as an “IT responsibility.”

Training & collaboration

Training is offered by most major business intelligence solutions vendors and it’s imperative that business users attend these trainings and take away important applicable information. The curriculum must be geared to the non-technical user and broken down into chewable pieces. Collaborating with IT professionals in your company will be extremely important for this project to fly because after all, they have years of experience overseeing BI technology and can provide you with a wealth of knowledge.

Data accessibility & discovery

Many business users don’t have experience with in depth use of business intelligence tools such as incorporating algorithms, defining business rules, and joining data sets. Without guidance these can be time consuming activities and developing a front end that handles the data layer can mitigate these challenges. Additionally, business users don’t necessarily trust the data fully so the data needs to manage in a way to ensure accuracy over time and the origin of the data collected needs to be communicated to the business user.

Interactivity 

After the data has been prepared, business users need to be able to explore the data in such a way that suites their needs and objectives. The interactions with the tool need to be correct to that data is joined properly, algorithms are applied correctly, and business rules are added. This can be a challenge because organizations have to allow access to users to look at the data and this can be a subjective task that requires experience and time to achieve optimally. This is why the training and collaboration is so important to activities more downstream.

Ease of Use

Ease of use is extremely important to business users who are not particularly savvy with software applications. Choosing tools with drag and drop functionality, intuitive mapping and navigation, and easy to read help sections are imperative. In addition, building your service for ease of use includes getting rid of the red tape/bureaucracy and making the business intelligence as easy as possible to utilize.

In conclusion, the self-service business intelligence model is something you may encounter soon if you have not already and it’s going to take some time to adopt. Assigning business users the role of being data champions is key to becoming a data-driven company and makes a whole lot of sense because they are responsible for making business strategy decisions and know a lot more about what they are looking for out of data. I hope that you find these 5 tips helpful as you embark toward using a self-service business intelligence model.