How to Succeed with Self-Service Analytics eBook

Self-service analytics is the holy grail for organizations. It promises to empower business users to generate their own data and insights and liberate the information technology (IT) department to focus on more value-added activities than generating custom reports. But this win-win strategy often goes haywire immediately upon deployment.

Self-service analytics fails when empowered users create hundreds or even thousands of reports, most of which are variations on the same theme but contain conflicting metrics and data. This creates a proverbial Tower of Babel, where everyone talks, but no one communicates. The result is greater confusion and distrust of data than before.

This report describes why self-service analytics seems so easy in theory but is challenging in practice. More importantly, it provides several frameworks to guide organizations in rolling out a self-service analytics strategy that works. The key is to apply the right amount of governance to balance empowerment with control.

This eBook discusses:

• The pitfalls and paradoxes of self-service analytics
• A framework for classifying business users
• The governance process to manage standard reports
• How to coordinate corporate and distributed resources to support business users and ensure that data needs are met
• AI-enabled tools and data virtualization technologies that play a critical role in making self-service a reality