Everyone over the age of five knows about social networks and social media. No matter which platform you prefer and how you choose to share your thoughts and ideas, you are no doubt engaged in the networking world. When it comes to business intelligence and analytics, there is no reason you can’t employ the same techniques to share, collaborate, create and innovate.
When your business users are asked to take on yet another responsibility, they are likely to balk. Most companies are short-handed and expect more of their team members than ever before. There are a lot of good reasons to initiate data democratization and engage in digital transformation to modernize and improve the enterprise and to improve results. If the business can encourage data sharing and collaboration, it can also improve the shared knowledge of the team and create accountability and empowerment. In so doing, the business can leverage the knowledge and skill of each team member and ensure that every business user is working to their full potential with the all the information they need to solve problems and to capitalize on opportunities.
What is business intelligence? Business intelligence is a body of intelligence gleaned from data and information within your business enterprise. It is comprised of the strategies, data and technologies and brought together for the purpose of data analytics. BI technologies are used to provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations and to help make fact-based decisions.
There are many reasons for a business to consider a self-serve business intelligence solution for business users. If properly deployed, BI tools improve productivity, accuracy and speed of decisions and competitive advantage – among other things.
A few months ago, I was talking to a friend (someone who has worked, for years, in the IT industry) and happened to mention data democratization. In this age of modern business intelligence, augmented analytics and Citizen Data Scientists, one would think that every IT professional would know the term ‘data democratization’ and its crucial importance to the business environment and success. But, my friend did not know or understand the term or its importance. In fact, she was even a bit skeptical about the potential and the movement toward self-serve business intelligence and analytics.
If your has selected a software product and your users have embraced that product, you do not want to rock the boat! You want to be able to continue using that useful solution. But, you may also need to add features or functionality to improve accurate reporting, to increase productivity and data sharing, to solve problems and identify opportunities or all of the above. So, what do you do?
Businesses can no longer afford to make decisions based on gut or opinion. Today’s management teams and directors insist on measurable results and metrics that clearly demonstrate what is working, what should be changed or updated and how to get to the results they want and achieve the objectives they have set.
If your business spends a lot of time and money on the task of extracting, transforming and loading data (ETL) and preparing that data for analysis, you might want to consider the advantages of self-serve data ET. Self-Service ETL can and should be easy enough for business users so that your business can enjoy the benefits of advanced analytics without hiring a team of data scientists or IT professionals.
There are many benefits to self-service business intelligence and business analytics. Many (in fact most) enterprises are going to a self service BI environment that will increase the value of each team member by providing them with easy-to-use BI tools that they can leverage to make decisions, to understanding issues, to share data and plan for the future and to find business opportunities.
If your business wants to democratize data and provide access to business intelligence tools to satisfy the needs of every business user, you may want to engage a business intelligence consultant to help you better understand your requirements for data and systems integration and to plan a simple, straightforward implementation and training schedule that will get you where you want to go, quickly and easily.
