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DIY Business Intelligence

DIY Business Intelligence
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Business Intelligence is an all-encompassing term that refers to all activities and best practices necessary for a business to turn data into actionable knowledge. BI includes-primarily- data warehousing, analytics, reporting and visualization. Data warehousing is the collating of integrated disparate data sources into one centralized repository. Analytics is the systematic exploration of your company’s data, within the data warehouse. Or to put it in simpler terms, figuring out what you know, don’t know and need to know within the scope of your company’s existence.

The main aim of business intelligence is to ensure that your company gains a competitive advantage and increase profits. BI achieves this by providing in depth knowledge about the business, the market, the competition, the customers, the industry and the regulatory control.

It sounds like the best deal your company could ever make to guarantee its success. But sometimes there isn’t the time, resources or inclination to bring on board an entire BI team of consultants, data scientists and highly trained analytics specialists.

So what’s such a company to do? It’s simple really, do the analytics yourself.

Self-service business intelligence is the analytics that enables business users to access and work with business data without a background in analytics or data mining. It allows end users to design their own queries to get answers to whatever business questions they are asking. It allows teams to focus on specific tasks thus promoting effectiveness and efficiency.

Self-service BI still has the following considerations to be had:

  • Training is still necessary to ensure users can query, understand what data is available and create personalized reports.
  • Intuitive user interface
  • User friendly dashboards

Self-service BI is becoming increasingly popular because it increases productivity. It increases the value of your data since end users have direct access to the information they need to analyze.

According to Gartner, end users design and deploy their own reports and analysis within an approved and supported architecture and tools portfolio. Users can make queries and connect with disparate data sources from within the organization or outside.

Essentially, self-service BI is a distributed BI model. Data governance is necessitated to ensure the data remains private and secure. This ensure that users can access information that is pertinent to their station. It also maintains integrity of the data. Self-service BI eliminates any gridlock or bottleneck that arises from having a single system that responds to every query.

Self-service BI is necessary because:

  • Analytics requirements evolve faster than an IT-centric system can keep up with.
  • Clients’ needs may not always be met with IT.
  • The need to create metrics on the fly.
  • Auto modelling data.
  • Immediate responses for “what-if” analyses.
  • Collaboration among operational staff members within an organization

Self-service BI is an investment that should be considered by all business owners, to be their sole BI venture or alongside an elaborate BI undertaking.

Self-service BI is provided by our partners Microsoft and Tableau and together we can ensure that your company selects the most suitable self-service model to ensure you meet your goals.

Contact Pathways International today.

Email: info@pathwaysinternational.com

 


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