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Writer's pictureSandeep Raut

Self-Service BI - How to succeed?

BI is a necessity for the survival of organizations. Self-service business intelligence (BI) is becoming more popular than guided analytics. As more and more tools have started to make it easier for business users at all levels to get actionable insights from growing volumes of data.

Research firm Gartner’s survey of more than 3,000 CIOs shows that the IT executives ranked analytics and BI as the top differentiating technology for their organizations. Gartner says data and analytics leaders are increasingly implementing self-service capabilities to create a data-driven culture throughout their organization.

Now the question is how to succeed in implementing self-service BI. But before we delve into it. Let us first define what is a self-service BI. From my experience with self-service BI, a simple definition is

The goal of self-service BI is to empower end-users so they can make decisions based on their analyses, instead of forcing them to use only the data and reports available from a larger BI system.”

The main idea is to empower end-users to derive actionable insights, which in turn will improve organization-wide decision making.

Before we talk about success factors a generic BI architecture is shown below

BI Architecture
BI Architecture

The key success factors are


1. Data: We have seen more often than not the organizations wish to implement the self-service BI. But it is important to ensure that the data is available and in the right format. Many organizations struggle with understanding the complexity of the data sources. Data quality, governance are very important building blocks for success in Self-service BI. In our experience data needs to be clean, unambiguous, accurate, timely. Organizations must strive for a “single version of the truth”. Organize the data the way people look at the business. Have a Data glossary in place

2. Executive sponsorship: Organizations that wish to succeed in self-service BI should ensure executive sponsorship. If this factor is lacking then it is just a wish list. This means business goals need to be tied to BI implementation outcomes. Build what they need. That means let it be business-driven. The real power of BI is data-driven decisions that improve business performance. Always focus on leading indicators like sales pipeline, win %, etc.

3. Agile Approach: “Don’t Boil the Ocean”. In our experience across BI implementations, an Agile approach works best. Scope your work in small increments and deliver. If you have to fail, then fail early so that you can adjust and achieve the goals. Make sure you have clear exit criteria for each iteration.

4. BI Team: Our experience shows when the team has representation from the business and technical team. IT teams can not be the driver of BI. It is better to have BI team members report to functional heads like CFO, CMO. Building a prototype is very critical. The team needs to have functional and technical depth.

5. Focus on one tool that will fit your needs: It is nice to have a standardized tool for your organization. But it goes back to reducing the complexity of data and once you do that, that will be of great benefit to any single tool or a combination of tools. The standardized tool will also lead to an economy of scale and uniform infrastructure.

6. Manage your costs: Since budgets are constraints, a lot of the self-service BI tools out there put a lot of features into the products and charge a premium for the same. It again comes back to data complexity. If you organize your data well, you will be able to analyze your data with less sophisticated tools which also cost less. This means you are not overly relying on the BI tool vendor for your analysis.


To summarize from our experience after implementing many BI projects, these are the six factors that are crucial while you are rolling out self-service BI in your organization. If you focus on these factors you will be able to succeed in implementing self-service BI for your organization.

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