Some of the newest buzzword in the BI (Business Intelligence) industry is ‘self-service BI’, and ‘self-service analytics’.  These new jargons refer to the empowering of end users to directly access and analyze business intelligence data without help from the IT staff. We’d like to take this definition a step further and include social BI as a necessity to self-service BI. As Business Intelligence and Business Analytics becomes easier and more user-centric, social-networking like capabilities are becoming a requirement as well.  While this could get complex in very large organizations with many more BI users, and no clear standards for reporting across organizations, small and medium-sized businesses could greatly benefit by including self-service, centralized reporting in their business intelligence strategies.:

Stuck in a rut – why self service analytics has not taken off

According to Gartner Research, adoption of BI tools by business users has remained fixed since 2008, with less than 30% of potential users within an organization actually using BI. The two big reasons for why most BI tools available today do not meet end-user needs are: flexibility and ease-of-use.

A more technical explanation would be that the rigidity of underlying data models for most BI solutions do not support the kind of “slicing and dicing” of business information that users need. According to a Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, “Any [self-service] BI tool is only as good or gives you only as good an answer as the underlying multidimensional data model”.

How does FusionOps solve the Self-service Analytics problem?

• FusionOps has created very flexible business data models that can be directly accessed by business users. End users can add columns to a report, choose measures, filter based on the criteria they want and visualize the data in many different ways. All of this can be done on-the-fly, without IT help. What’s more, FusionOps enables users to save their work to a dashboard and share it with other users in a Facebook-like experience.