October 16, 2012
Organizations today want to be driven by data. They want to anchor daily and strategic decisions in a bedrock of solid, extensive, and timely analysis and reporting. Organizations want to reach out to more data sources and integrate diverse data to gain single views of important business objects and domains, including customers, products, and services. Business intelligence (BI) and analytics are essential technologies, methods, and processes to support data-driven decisions. However, in most organizations, only a minority of users can access them. This needs to change if data-driven objectives are to be achieved.
Personal, self-service BI and analytics tools are now available that can give users more control over how they view and access data and the reports, dashboards, and visualizations they need to perform their roles in the enterprise. Easier deployment and configuration, improved self-service features, and technology advances such as in-memory computing are giving users work environments that are robust enough to perform significant BI and analytics processes without involving IT at every step.
This TDWI Checklist Report details seven steps toward personal BI and analytics success.