by Angela Guess
Dev Tandon recently wrote in Information Management, “Business intelligence, once a coveted technology for only the elite enterprises, has evolved to the point of mass consumption. While a 2011 Bloomberg study revealed that 97 percent of companies with revenue of more than $100 million used a business analytics solution, self-service business intelligence has changed the game. Five years later, as Gartner points out in its latest release of its BI Magic Quadrant, there are more tools than ever to choose from, resulting in mid-market and even small businesses jumping into the data game.”
Tandon goes on, “The benefits of self-service business intelligence are hard to dispute – setup driven by the end user instead of IT; easily-accessible and understood analytics; and intuitive visualization and dashboard capabilities. As industry vendors trend toward cloud-based technology, many users also benefit from better security, faster upgrades, and low cost, off-site deployment. As users seek new functionality, something new is emerging on the horizon – full service business intelligence. For the benefit of IT leaders not yet experienced with full service business intelligence, let me offer some insights.”
He continues, “These solutions streamline even more of the analytics process by eliminating the typical steps preceding and following self-service BI. All BI programs start with the energy-draining and time-intensive data preparation process. As users know, data has to be collected, cleaned up, and put into a structured format, a painful but necessary first step. Analysts spend 50-85 percent of their time on this responsibility, notes one study, significantly cutting into their highly-beneficial reporting and analysis hours.”
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