Q&A: Self-Service vs Traditional Business Intelligence

Anyone who knows what this photo depicts? Hint: it’s the father of self-service….

What do you find people misunderstand about self-service BI’s concept?

That it’s a very hard thing to define concretely in terms of technology implementation. The underlying business need is a very broad concept that covers a very wide range of different types of technologies and information uses, and that the distinctions between “reports,” “dashboards”, “data discovery,” etc are blurry — and the need for “business information” covers a lot more than what is stored in traditional databases (documents, external news feeds, etc.)

There’s no truly self-service BI solution.