July 1, 2011
In today's economic environment, organizations must use business intelligence (BI) to make smarter, faster decisions. Yet, in too many organizations, decisions are still not based on business intelligence because of the inability to keep up with demand for information and analytics. One way to satisfy this demand is to set up a self-service BI (SS BI) environment.
Self-service BI offers an environment in which information workers can create and access specific sets of BI reports, queries, and analytics themselves—without IT intervention. This approach extends the reach and scope of BI applications to address a wider range of business needs and problems. At the same time, this extension must support the information workers’ need for a personalized and collaborative decision-making environment. Information workers must become more self-sufficient by having a BI environment that is more usable and more consumable. It is these two themes—usability and consumability—that play crucial roles in a fully functioning self-service business intelligence (SS BI) environment.