I’ll start by saying that I’m quite adamant about what self-service business intelligence is, and isn’t.
There was a post on LinkedIn a week ago, that turned my thoughts to this, and made this the topic for today.
I find it baffling that the conventional idea of self-service analytics is for the “business user” to have the ability to create their own dashboards/views.
Why baffling? Well, 2 reasons.
- It didn’t really work with Excel.
- Data Literacy – It’s now becoming a well-recognised fact that data literacy is low amongst people that aren’t analysts. When it comes down to it (in the nicest possible way), most people wouldn’t know a dimension or measure if it introduced itself nicely in the street. To expect these people to easily create something, from nothing would, be pure fantasy, would probably lead to an increase in failed BI projects, and would be a dis-service to (not only) the IT/BI teams that work so hard to implement a project, but also to the users how would be left with something they largely wouldn’t use.
Excel Hell
Excel is (for me) the original self-service software, and a client once stated that they are “in excel hell” to describe the effect of Excel on the business.
Everyone can freely create with excel, and it quickly comes unmanageable. Not only from the amount of spreadsheets that are created, it also causes chaos because everyone creates their own view, from the same data, at different times, often with wildly different calculations and the business then becomes mired in a swamp of differing results and opinions.
I’ve also had exactly the same conversation with a Tableau user, who had to create a visualisation of all their Tableau dashboards because they gave everyone the ability to create, and found that it very quickly became untenable, with around 1500 tableau dashboards.
Don’t even get me started on errors in spreadheets! That’s a post for another day.
If the thought is that self-service is actually just for analysts, then this should be something that people are upfront about when discussing this, not saying that self-service is for everyone, when in fact it’s not.
This approach gives the IT and BI teams serious palpitations, not to mention the humble user, who even if they believe they have the right skills, generally don’t.
Where’s the governance? How do you ensure that everyone is using the same measures? My post last week mentioned a conversation I had with an organisation that had 15 different definitions of FTE. The BI Team seek to make sure that issues like this don’t arise, and are understandably reluctant to let everyone create their own views but the widely accepted view of self-service would only go and exacerbate these problems.
What’s my opinion on this?
Is self-service for everyone?
Absolutely!
I firmly side with the BI/IT teams about giving the general user the ability to create from scratch, sure there will be people that have that ability, but they’re in the minority.
As I said previously, the low standard of data literacy would mean this would create more problems than it would solve, and would move an organisation away from being more agile. Isn’t the desire for agility the point of self-service? So why would you do something that makes you less so?
I think Qlik says it best:
The premise of self-service business intelligence is to give all employees access to insights that will help them make better decisions, regardless of analytics skills.
Source: Self-Service BI: What it means, why it matters, and best practices https://bit.ly/32jhbE8
I’ve come to see self-service analytics as split into 2 distinct groups:
Guided and Self-Service Analytics.
Guided Analytics (Think of this as “traditional” analytics) is where the BI team build an application (Qlik call them applications, not dashboards) with a certain need in mind, be that Sales Marketing, operations, project management to name a small number of uses.
The users then interact with the application, and if there are any other questions, then they have to raise a change request, and wait until the BI team can implement that for them.
Great for day to day, standard, requirements, but organisations are now needing to be more agile.
It’s a fact, the decision window has shrunk massively and people are now looking to make decisions on that day.
Any longer can seriously impact the business.
All BI software does this very well, most “new age” BI software is just “Excel on steroids.”
Self-service Analytics
I believe that self-service covers 2 areas:
- Knowledge workers that need to be more flexible and build their own analyses.
- Business users that need to make decisions quickly.
Yes the knowledge workers would be given the ability to create from the ground up, they would have the skills to be able to do this.
Business users, though, would have an application, built for them by the BI Team, as they would for Guided Analytics, but then the user is given the ability empowered (empowered is an overused word, but incredibly relevant here) to then make changes to charts, by use of an easy to understand, drag and drop governed library, called Master Items in Qlik Sense.
These users can change the chart type or replace/add dimensions and measures.
Qlik Sense will also suggest the most appropriate visualisation, and the user will then be prompted for a dimension/measure, which is contained in the governed library, under 3 headings (dimensions/measures and visualisations)
Governance
All this is all well and good, but how do you then gain the governance to ensure that these people are using the same dimensions and measures?
This comes down to the governed library, the users see this as the Master Items library, which is the cornerstone of self-service. The BI Team creates and curates this governed library, so the dimensions/measures are all guaranteed to be the same, and infinitely reusable. Not only for the business user, but for the knowledge workers/analysts.
This was something that had limited availability in QlikView, but has come to the fore in Qlik Sense.
Implementing self-service in this way, largely removes the change requests, allows the BI team to focus on what they do best, and empowers (again appropriate) the analysts and general users to do what they do best.
AI (Artificial Intelligence, or Augmented?)
AI has become a buzz word recently, and is often a way for vendors to make orders larger by adding more software to the requirement. There are lots of companies that have sprung up in this space.
What if you’re a small to medium business, without the budget to invest in this?
That’s where Augmented Intelligence (Qlik’s AI) comes in. Qlik’s AI is baked into Qlik Sense.
Simply stated – instead of just solely relying on pure machine automation, as you may find with typical Artificial Intelligence applications, Augmented Intelligence works with human interaction and perspective to solve complex business problems.
Mike Tarallo – Qlik
By combining the Associative experience and Qlik’s cognitive engine, it creates what is in effect an intelligent assistant right at your fingertips.
Why is this good?
Qlik’s AI allows you to conversationally search the data, giving a faster easier way to ask questions and get insights.
You can auto-generate visual analyses to help see the data in new ways, and uncover hidden insights.
For the developers, it speeds up the porcess of building an application with visualisation suggestions, association recommendations to name a couple of areas it helps.
Supplemental to Qlik’s AI is the Insight Advisor.
The Insight Advisor not only learns from the data, but the user’s behaviour AS WELL. Bringing important insights to the fore. Which lowers the skills required to analyse the data and to keep asking and answering the stream of questions that are always the result.
Qlik’s Mike Tarallo made an excellent video on this: https://bit.ly/3imJRBB
I think it’s time that the answer to what is self-service BI, is standardised, and everyone starts talking about the same thing. Much like the company with all those versions of FTE, how can we truly know what something is if the words used aren’t consistent.
Thanks again for reading this, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic.
Until next time, stay safe!
Data Dereck 