Self-Serve BI Challenges

Cindi Howson has written an interesting article for Endeca called The Five Myths of Self-Service BI, which is summarized on her blog at BIScorecard.com.  You can download the report for free from Endeca after registering your email address.  It's short and concise, and worth a quick read.

What Is Self-Serve Business Intelligence?
The article defines self-serve BI as providing users "with direct access to all the data they need to make critical business decisions."  In my experience, self-serve is broader than just direct access to data.  It also includes more user-friendly approaches, such as allowing users to modify or create reports based on a template or within a certain set of defined attributes and facts.  In essence it involves enabling the users to serve as many of their changing decision-making needs as possible without being dependent on the IT department to do it for them.

While I like the good intentions of self-serve BI, I have always had reservations about some of the presumptions surrounding it.  I certainly concur with Cindi's first two myths, and have seen them demonstrated in the real world.

Myth 1:  Business Users Will Create Their Own Queries
I would expand that myth even further:  Business users will create their own reports using the BI tool.  Very few users are interested in writing their own reports or queries, especially given the complexity of some of the BI tools and data models they have to navigate.  The few users who are interested in writing queries are already doing it, so giving them a new BI environment is unlikely to bring huge improvements in their decision support capabilities.  The majority who are not writing queries now will still not be doing it after you build them a data warehouse.  Count on it.

Myth 2: BI Is So Easy To Use, Even Casual Users Will Embrace BI
I think this myth might be caused by IT managers believing the marketing hype from the BI companies.  Unfortunately, many BI tools are not as easy to use as the unofficial benchmark that all business users measure against:  Microsoft Excel.  As Cindi says, "respondents identified BI tools as one of the hardest category of office tools to use."

Ouch!  I remember as a data user when the data warehouse folks showed up with their much-hyped BI tool.  I couldn't believe how user UN-friendly it was.  I preferred using Excel, SQL, and SAS any day.  Those tools always got the job done.

Self-serve BI must be targeted to the different needs of the business users.  Some will want self-serve as direct access to the data, so they can write their SQL queries themselves.  Some others will want pre-built reports that they can modify slightly whenever necessary.  For the remainder of users, self-serve BI functionality will never be touched.  Our plans for self-serve BI implementations must incorporate these realities.