www.biscorecard.

com

Five Myths
By Cindi Howson

The

of Self-Service BI

Sponsored by:

2011 BI Scorecard
March 2011

About the Author

CINDI HOWSON is the founder of BI Scorecard, a resource for in-depth BI product reviews, based on exclusive handson testing. She has been advising clients on BI tool strategies and selections for 15 years. She is the author of Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App and Business Objects XI: The Complete Reference. Prior to founding BI Scorecard, Howson was a manager at Deloitte & Touche and a BI standards leader for a Fortune 500 company. She is a TDWI (The Data Warehousing Institute) faculty member, contributing expert to Information Week and the B-EYE Network. She has an MBA from Rice University. She can be reached at cindihowson@biscorecard.com

Self-Service BI:

The Vision
The vision for self-service BI is an enticing one: provide business users with direct access to all the data they need to make critical business decisions. Business users will be empowered. Gut-feel decision-making will be replaced with fact-based decisions that are more aligned with the goals of the business. IT will be an enabler, rather than a gate keeper and hindrance to business intelligence. Thats the vision. Reality is harshly different. Too often companies deploy an ad hoc or business query tool, thinking thats all it takes for self-service BI. IT, burned in the past by their apparent lack of responsiveness, exposes power users to all possible elements in the data warehouse, not wanting to omit any critical business element. Users move from frustration at not being able to get to their data to now being overwhelmed by the number of data choices. Instead of self-service BI bringing greater business-IT partnership, the relationship further disintegrates as IT washes its hands of anything business users create on their own. Self-service BI is a worthy vision; there are several myths, however, that prevent self-service BI from being realized. Its the myths that need dispelling for a more successful and realistic journey to self-service business intelligence.

About the Sponsor

Endeca is a search and business intelligence software company that improves daily decisions for employees and purchase decisions for customers. Endeca Latitude, an innovative BI platform, is a new type of business intelligence (BI) software that enables the self-service exploration of diverse and changing data and guides business professionals to answers for new, unanticipated questions. With Endeca Latitude, business professionals gain access to all the information they need in a powerful, yet simple-to-use, analytic application and the freedom to explore the information in an unconstrained and intuitive manner using search and interactive visualizations. The result is unprecedented visibility, analytic power, and insight. IT professionals gain the power to bring together diverse data with ease and remarkable speed resulting in better alignment with the business and a more agile IT organization. This new model for information access and analytics has made even the worlds most advanced enterprises more responsive and has brought them hundreds of millions of dollars in decreased costs, increased revenues, and improved productivity.

self-service BI an The vision forprovide businessisusers with enticing one: direct access to all the data they need to make critical business decisions.

Myth 1: Business users will create their own queries.

Self-service BI has become synonymous with the expectation that business users can and want to create their own queries from scratch. This is an unrealistic goal for anyone but power users, even when the BI tool does not require a user to know SQL or MDX. As the following figure depicts, there is a range of user types and corresponding requirements. Different job levels, roles, responsibilities, data, and IT literacy require distinct BI capabilities. At the core of the spectrum are the more sophisticated users: statisticians and IT developers. These user types may have advanced skills to write their own SQL or MDX queries. They may want to extract and combine data from multiple data sources on the fly as new business questions arise. In the next band are the business analysts and information workers. This is the sweet spot for traditional business query tools, because data access and analysis is a large component of their jobs. The business query tool shields them from the underlying complexities of the physical schema in the data warehouse and source systems. They can author their own queries without having to know SQL, thus avoiding the IT bottleneck. For users to create their own queries in an ad hoc or business query tool, users still must know: Data nuances: the difference between gross sales vs. sales net of returns, ship-to-customer vs. sold-to-customer. Database concepts: to author efficient queries, its helpful to know, when a certain query will return a large data set, which elements are ideal for filtering to give the correct response time. SQL or MDX concepts: While power users may not write their own SQL or MDX, having a basic understanding of these query languages will help in authoring more sophisticated business questions that use things like a HAVING clause (sales greater than N), INTERSECT (customers who bought both products A and B), or how to nest AND/OR clauses (states where product A sold, but not if the product was on sale). However, business analysts and information workers are only part of the user spectrum and are often not the decisionmakers. Instead, they typically support decision-makers, whether managers (for strategic and tactical decisions) or front-line workers (for operational decisions). These outer spectrums of users have different requirements for how they want to access and interact with the data. Their requirements for self-service BI are vastly different from power users requirements.
rs, Suppliers & Regula tome tors Cus Line Workers Front-

Dashboards

s & Manag cutive ers Exe Information W ts & ork ys al veloper De s IT

Statisticians

BI Search

s er

An

Business Query

Commonly Used

Specialist Feature Complexity

Commonly Used

Figure 1: There are different segments of potential BI users, warranting distinct user interfaces and capabilities. Business query tools are ideal for power users and are the traditional view of self-service BI. Dashboards are ideal for executives, managers, and front-line workers. BI Search serves the broadest range of users. Managers and executives need fast access to data to answer sometimes unpredictable questions, but they lack the skills and time to use advanced authoring tools. Instead, an interactive, pre-built report may be more suitable when executives are investigating one particular management area. Interactive dashboards are more ideal when managers are monitoring several business areas and looking for patterns and problem areas when KPIs are below target. A dashboard is most different from a report or query in that it displays information from multiple data sources, often in a more graphical, interactive way. Even further out on the spectrum, front-line workers, customers, and suppliers will have more routine requirements, perhaps only needing a simple filter or sort option within a report. They certainly dont want to start with a blank screen with a list of 100s of data elements from which to choose.

Reality Check:
4 Recognize that only a fraction of business users are authors;

however, a larger portion of potential BI users are information consumers.

4 Only power users with requisite skills will create their own queries

and reports using traditional ad hoc or business query tools.

4 Other classes of users may require a different BI tool interface

and information delivery mechanism, such as dashboards, interactive reports, and BI Search.

The Five Myths of Self-Service BI 2

Myth 2: BI is so easy to use, even casual users will embrace BI.

In a recent survey BI Scorecard conducted on ease of use of BI tools, respondents identified BI tools as one of the hardest category of office tools to use. The only software rated harder to use and learn was the transaction system. Ease of use is not to be underestimated in the journey to self-service BI. It is particularly important when a company is trying to change old decision-making patterns, whether relying only on experts to use BI or moving from a culture of gut-feel to fact-based decisions. Moving BI beyond the realm of power users to more casual users may require a different BI tool interface. Some innovations that bring greater ease of use are the concepts of BI Search, progressive filtering, and personalization. Other approaches include leveraging the familiarity of Microsoft Office interfaces such as Outlook, proactive alerting to notify decision-makers of problem areas, and greater attention to visual appeal. BI Search takes the simplicity of Google and applies it to business intelligence. Rather than users dragging and dropping database elements onto a page to build a query, instead, a user simply enters key words such as Sales in New York 2010. BI tools that leverage this capability will at the very least search meta data on existing reports and dashboards. More robust tools will search database content. If an existing dashboard or report is not available, then the tool may also use the search key words to generate a new query. Results are displayed in such a way that the business user can progressively filter through relevant information by various attributes and dimensions. The report or dashboard may automatically be personalized with content related to their area of responsibility. As shown in the earlier spectrum, BI Search serves the needs of a broad range of users, both casual and power users. It is a different way of accessing data by visually filtering out what is not necessary and honing in on the most relevant subset of information.

Reality Check:
4 A robust BI tool portfolio is made up of multiple BI interfaces,

ideally suited for the user and task at hand. These interfaces may or may not come from the same vendor.
4 Newer interfaces such as BI Search provide greater ease of use

than traditional interfaces.

4 Ease of use is important for all BI users, but more so for new

classes of users whose jobs are not predominantly spent accessing and analyzing data.

BI Search takes the simplicity of Google and applies it to business intelligence.

Myth 3: Self-Service BI is only for internal users.

While much of the initial efforts to deploy self-service BI centers around internal power users, the vision for selfservice BI should encompass customers and suppliers as well. However, in embracing these outer spectrums of the user segments, it is even more critical to consider the appropriateness of the interface. It is rarely a business query tool with broad access to corporate data. Instead, customers may want to view only their purchases, product catalogs, order fulfillment times, services consumed, and so on. Consider the following examples: A utility customer accessing a bill who then wants to compare consumption from this month versus the prior months and then compare trends with external data such as average temperatures. A retail customer purchasing apparel who wants to see sizing for past orders. A supplier who wants to view past fulfillment history, stock levels, and benchmark data for their delivery performance with other suppliers. All of these examples reflect unmet needs that self-service BI can fill. This level of service and information is a big competitive differentiator, one that customers will increasingly demand. Ease of use as discussed in Myth 2 is even more important for customers and suppliers. These user segments cant justify the time to learn an interface and certainly may not have access to BI training. The right interface for these users is one that requires no training. Rich reportlets in which a user accesses a fixed report, but then can interact with a self-contained snapshot of information are one way to deliver self-service BI. Faceted search as discussed in the previous section is yet another way. The important point here is in recognizing the potential for BI applications beyond corporate boundaries.

Reality Check:
4 Self-service BI is not only for internal users. 4 Consider the insights and decisions customers and suppliers

make when engaging with your company. Look for opportunities to provide them easy access to data to support their decision-making.

Myth 4: I will have access to all my data.

Users often ask for direct access to corporate data, because they have been frustrated by slow response times from IT. A simple change request to a report may take months for IT to deliver. Trying to avoid round trips to IT, business users ask for access to everything, even if thats not what they really need. IT will provide access to as much data as possible without violating any security issues. Not wanting business users to learn SQL, most BI tools use a business meta data layer so that users have a friendly, business view of information in the data warehouse. The business view is a powerful way to hide the physical complexities of the database from end users. The problem, though, is in defining a business-focused, flexibleyet-manageable business view. First, the business view is a subset of all the information in the data warehouse. If the data exists in the data warehouse but its not exposed via the business view, users cant access it. In designing this business view, IT is still trying to anticipate all the questions users may want to pose. Further, because central IT often controls the business view, usually the business view connects only to enterprise-wide data sources and not departmental data. Often, line-of-business data and external data sources such as advertising promotions, supplier data, market prices, and so on are left out of the data warehouse. While newer versions of BI tools may allow for federated data access via a business view, organizational issues of control, responsibility, and commonality typically result in the business view being relevant only for enterprise data. Without an alternative, users are forced to export data from the BI tool into a spreadsheet to be able to merge data from different data sources. Manual, error-prone export and join processes are forced on power users. This workflow again puts all the knowledge and information in the hands of a few experts, sabotaging broad adoption of self-service BI. The owner of the spreadsheet becomes the trusted, relevant source, not the BI environment. Further, lack of a holistic approach to distributed data sources undermines the vision of a single version of the truth.

Reality Check:
4 Recognize that even when a company has an enterprise data

warehouse, critical data exists outside the warehouse.

4 When data needs to be routinely combined from multiple

data sources, access should be facilitated by the BI team. Organizational issues about who controls the business view must be addressed to allow the business access to all data, whether in the data warehouse, data marts, or personal data sources.
The Five Myths of Self-Service BI 4

Myth 5: I will have access to all my data.

In multiple surveys on BI success rates, the lack of the business-IT partnership is an often-cited reason for failure and less impactful BI. In order to succeed with business intelligence, business and IT must work together. Like the yin-yang symbol, business and IT bring different but complementary perspectives to business intelligence. Each side needs to value the distinct skills, work styles, and objectives of the other. Business users are often rewarded for risk taking, time to value, and achievement of business goals. IT, meanwhile, is often rewarded only on cost containment and system reliability, rarely on contribution to the business goals. IT is not less relevant with self-service BI. Both business and ITs roles may change, but collaboration, in fact, increases, and both sides need to be a more proactive partner for success. In traditional systems and early decision support systems, the business documents their requirements, throws them over the fence, then waits months for IT to build something useful. Usually, the requirements have changed by the time IT delivers something. IT may be responsible for authoring fixed reports, defining the presentation layer, and programming the interactions. Business intelligence demands a much more collaborative approach than traditional systems development. Many companies are turning to agile development for BI projects. With agile development, capabilities are delivered in faster increments. Teams with personnel from both the business and IT establish and refine requirements through prototypes, reviewed in face-to-face work sessions. With self-service BI, IT no longer builds fixed reports, but instead, defines the initial business meta data layer. Over time, business power users may take ownership of this business view of the data, but IT will continue to quality assure and provide guidance on usage, best practices, and performance enhancements. Standard reports, one-off requests, and dashboards are often designed by business power users. IT should continue to review these reports for usage and optimization. The role of IT should shift from one of gatekeeper to mentor. When IT refuses to support anything authored by a business power user, conflict increases and report chaos may ensue. Responsibilities may also shift from IT authoring everything to IT now authoring only the more complicated reports and dashboards; business authors handle the more routine queries. For some long-time custom report developers, there may be job security issues that make the vision of self-service BI unappealing. However, of all the software segments, business intelligence continues to be one of the hottest growth areas, showing double-digit growth from 2009 to 2010. Instead of IT feeling threatened by business intelligence, it should be viewed as an opportunity to retool and to become more vital. A corollary to this myth is that IT will have less to do once self-service BI is implemented. Success breeds success in business intelligence: if your company successfully implements self-service BI, the demand for new applications, new subject areas, and new capabilities often outpaces the ability to deliver. BI requires constant prioritization and assessment for how new deliverables align with business goals.

Reality Check:
4 A robust BI tool portfolio is made up of multiple BI interfaces,

ideally suited for the user and task at hand. These interfaces may or may not come from the same vendor.
4 Newer interfaces such as BI Search provide greater ease of

use than traditional interfaces.

4 Ease of use is important for all BI users, but more so for new

classes of users whose jobs are not predominantly spent accessing and analyzing data.

Conclusion
Business intelligence is a must-have capability for companies of all sizes and across all industries. Business intelligence allows people at all levels of an organization to access, interact with, and analyze data to manage the business, improve performance, discover opportunities, and operate efficiently. Self-service business intelligence empowers the decision-makers to ask and answer their own questions, with minimal support from IT. Self-service BI can speed the time to value, focus efforts on the highest value applications, and use skill sets more appropriately. This is the vision, but the reality today is that BI is often limited to internal power users in many companies. What actions will you take to make the vision a reality?
5