Self-Service Business Intelligence Is a Must-Have for Enterprises

Nearly 62% of organizations noted that self-service business intelligence (BI) is important in this year and beyond – claims the Dresner study

Business intelligence (BI) tools are being prioritized by many businesses to streamline workflow management. The long-promoted claim of the Self-Service BI for robust analytics apps and business tools – is now proven and working.  Such interesting insights came up from the latest report by Dresner Advisory Services. Its 9th annual report titled, “2020 Self-Service Business Intelligence Market Study” is focused on end-user deployment attitudes and evolving trends around the self-service business intelligence.

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Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, and Jira are the most common enterprise collaborative frameworks that are in use today, integrated with Self-Service BI platforms. Notably, the enterprises’ governance goals drive most collaboration, content creation, and sharing across the BI self-service landscape. The collaborative BI and user governance can build an environment where users can effortlessly create and share insights in a managed and consistent pattern. From 2017 to 2020, Self-Service BI continued as an essential tool by different sizes of organizations globally – the study claims.

The principal findings from the study are –

• Self-Service BI is highly essential for businesses lately. It is considered as the 6th most vital among different technologies and initiatives strategic toward business intelligence.
• It has been both critical and vital for businesses in 2020, and it is trending consistently from the previous years.
• Marketing & Sales professionals rated the data storytelling solution of Self-Service BI tools with the highest score and is a must-have for them. Finance, BICC, and Executive Management department are the next most interested users.
• About 60% of R&D team professionals consider Self-Service BI highly crucial for their on-going initiatives and projects.
• The two essential collaborative features in Self-Service BI solution are –

1. searching and navigating for valid content,
2. ability to share content and commentary with others

• The collaborative BI features are most used and in-demand for bigger enterprises – with more than 10K employees.
• Finance and Operations teams mostly prioritizing the BI systems’ search and navigate power combined with collaborative workflows.
• Microsoft SharePoint has been the most preferred enterprise collaborative framework. Similarly, Microsoft Teams is rising from 5th to 2nd place in rankings for 2020, and Jira holds third place.

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The study found that except IT, most of the business functions indicated collaboration and BI as either “very important” or “critical”.  As mentioned by Jim Ericson, Research Director of Dresner Advisory Services and Co-author of the report – “Importance of collaboration and BI tends to increase with organization size, but self-service is a significant topic for all companies seeking to better leverage vast information resources and a scarcity of expertise to drive improved group-based decision making in a governed fashion.”