This is a continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft entitled "Why Self-Service BI?" The speaker is Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft.
Mark Flaherty (MF): Any change in technology can generate excitement and fear, depending on the personality of the person. Most of the time it’s fear and anxiety about learning something new, when they were comfortable, if not satisfied, with the old way. A short orientation training session is a good start, and creating quick-start one sheeters about how to open up and use the first pre-built dashboards is next.
After a few weeks of experience with those KPI dashboards, identify the users who want more self-service, and give them a short training on how to modify existing dashboards and reports. After a few more weeks, give them a short training on how to develop dashboards from scratch. Ask them to identify in advance one that they have been wanting and make the building of it the in-class activity.
The idea is that companies will become more agile. Businesses will be able to react to market changes or program performance changes more quickly due to faster access to access to BI. Faster access to BI is a result of a decreased dependence on IT. Data that used to take a few days to get is available with a few clicks.
You’ll also likely be able to get rid of dozens or hundreds of repetitive or overlapping reports and save all the future effort on modifying those when requested.
In a self-service BI environment, your data will now be organized more efficiently. Possibly on the back-end you will have created a data warehouse. But certainly on the front-end, you’ll be able to organize just those fields that users want to use, give them intelligible, self-explanatory labels, and group them into logical data models.
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