InetSoft Webinar: What Are Some More Benefits Companies See from Self-Service BI Solutions?

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): The kind of interactivity available in software such as InetSoft's will give your self service business intelligence a new life and attract more attention and usage – when compared to the static tabular reports that users became used to. So they are likely to become more engaged and pull more actionable observations out of the data.

With most organizations, 80% of information that is requested by the business for day to day work can now be standardized. And the remaining 20% can be obtained with some adjustments to the standardized reports or exploratory dashboards.

The benefit of standardization for IT includes reduces ad hoc requests by about 85%, on average. An IT budget can be cut by up to 60% by a self-service BI implementation.

Automated decision-making or at least automated alerts when a decision is necessary can produce savings in cycle time. Business users have more confidence in their decision-making because all the necessary self service data preparation is available to them.

#1 Ranking: Read how InetSoft was rated #1 for user adoption in G2's user survey-based index Read More

What are the benefits of a single BI reporting tool standardization across an enterprise?

The learning curve for business users is simpler. They have only one tool to learn, and they can turn to other people in any part of the company for help when needed. There’s savings from internal training of business users. You can also get better support from your chosen BI vendor since they are getting more license sales as a result.

What is agile BI?

Agile is not a feature in software. It is a mindset and a process. Like any process, it depends heavily for success on people and the organizational culture in which it is being implemented. The roots of agile began in early 2000 with the agile manifesto, but its true roots go back even further in that it borrows from the core principles of lean manufacturing made famous by companies such as Toyota. Just in time, bottlenecks, continuous flow, total quality management, elimination of mudda (waste), and continuous improvements have their roots in the lean movement and these concepts have worked their way into agile.

InetSoft aims to support agile BI, and in fact, we were the first to incorporate it in our tagline "Easy, Agile, Robust." In our software, the direct data access models built with InetSoft's patent-pending Data Block technology, as well as the dashboards and reports are all self-service enabled. This accommodates both formal and experimental changes to a level that is unique in the BI space. In addition, our ad hoc reporting tools use a drag-and-drop interface based on simplified data models you choose. And the visualization techniques of highly interactive dashboards encourage and facilitate data exploration through multi-dimensional charting styles and point and click filtering and sorting.

Previous: Business Users of a New BI System