Today, Business Intelligence has become a fundamental tool for understanding what drives an organization, ultimately leading to better decisions. What was once withheld for those on a need-to-know basis is now accessible to all in the form of self-service BI. However, before empowering the people it is important to ensure the best possible outcome from the self-service BI and Analytics initiative.
What is self-service BI?
Self-service BI aims at giving the users of BI tools more freedom and responsibility at the same time. With its core assumption of user independence and self-sufficiency in terms of the use of business data & information, it leads to a decentralized BI in the organization.
Self-service BI is multi-faceted and its need within the same BI environment varies according to user requirements. Its meaning depends mainly on the specific requirements of particular user roles and for each role, it helps users accomplish various tasks. Casual BI users are often only required to be able to filter and group data. Power users or business analysts may have to integrate local data from multiple sources on their own so they can quickly build or enhance existing reports and even change semantic models.
Self-service solutions help companies address the challenge of business departments having access to data and information anytime and anywhere. To stay ahead of the competition, companies need to act as fast as possible on latest insights gathered from analytics.
Traditional BI delivery models cannot always offer the level of agility and efficiency that rapidly changing requirements demand. Since data volumes and sources are growing constantly, an iterative approach to analysis is required to find new promising business use cases and to leverage the full economic value of the data at hand.
We assisted a client who was operating an online lottery platform with multiple disparate systems, includes marketing automation & email marketing system, a web analytics application, an affiliate management software and multichannel payment system.
The decision support system required consolidation of information across these applications which resulted in sub optimal allocation of resources and eventual delay in decision making. The client was seeking process improvement and realization of better ROI through BI solution.
We developed a BI strategy that included Discovery, Infrastructure Architecture & high-level Implementation Plan for the client. The tool evaluation phase included offering business users with an agile, intuitive and scalable interface.
The tool developed by us was a combination of enterprise & open source BI technology stack complementing client’s IT infrastructure. The implementation phase included design of a Data Warehouse, development of an ETL architecture and automation with industry specific Reporting & Analytics.
The Outcome
A single point of truth across the organization facilitated quick and timely decision making. This resulted in a BI layer with four core areas such as Product-Customer-Campaign-Web Insight with an integrated view of data from core lottery, marketing, web-analytics and payment systems. This enabled business users to traverse through the data with only a few clicks.
A set of Dashboards & Analytical Reports were developed and deployed to facilitate better reporting mechanism for the client. Ad hoc reporting capabilities allowed business users to create custom reports on their own thus reducing dependency on IT time and cost of report development. We had a complete BI infrastructure conceptualized, developed and deployed in 12-14 weeks with least investment.
The demand for simple, quick and user-friendly BI software solutions is on the rise and has been for years. Enterprises are striving hard to enable business users to build or design their queries, reports, interfaces and even data models.
Get in touch with us to help you empower your decision makers.
