I don't understand the juxtaposition used in your article. I am very interested in the topic. Observing my customers, the easiest self-service tool is Excel, then Excel PivotTables, then maybe PowerBI, then far in the distance other niche tools that are not touched by business people. They usually find analysts they trust. But (very) gradually they understand that touching the data is as valuable as walking the factory/office floor. 'Powerful' and 'easy to pick up' is an unsolved problem in BI. BR, Hristo
This is thought-provoking, thanks. I see self-serve as the answer to two communities. for the VPs, it's a bunch of KPIs in which they can do 1 or 2 actions, not more. That little interactivity is enough to engage/empower them in a way a powerpoint doesn't, and "might" make them a bit more independent. But the other important community is technical experts that aren't analysts. I have worked with many scientists that are extremely savvy and know the data and subject matter inside and out. But they don't know how to impute missing values, pivot, filter, summarize, repivot and then resummarize the data (not to say anything about geocoding, scraping and all the other tools that have a lower floor now). Self-serve gives these people claws in a fight they would have thought unwinnable before tools like Power BI gave them options.
>But this path is a catch-22. The more questions people can theoretically self-serve, the > >fewer they can practically self-serve. As you add more options, self-serve tools stop looking >like Mad Libs, and start looking like a blank document that requires people to write their own >stories in their entirety. While that’s what analysts want, it’s not what everyone wants.
I don't understand the juxtaposition used in your article. I am very interested in the topic. Observing my customers, the easiest self-service tool is Excel, then Excel PivotTables, then maybe PowerBI, then far in the distance other niche tools that are not touched by business people. They usually find analysts they trust. But (very) gradually they understand that touching the data is as valuable as walking the factory/office floor. 'Powerful' and 'easy to pick up' is an unsolved problem in BI. BR, Hristo
This is thought-provoking, thanks. I see self-serve as the answer to two communities. for the VPs, it's a bunch of KPIs in which they can do 1 or 2 actions, not more. That little interactivity is enough to engage/empower them in a way a powerpoint doesn't, and "might" make them a bit more independent. But the other important community is technical experts that aren't analysts. I have worked with many scientists that are extremely savvy and know the data and subject matter inside and out. But they don't know how to impute missing values, pivot, filter, summarize, repivot and then resummarize the data (not to say anything about geocoding, scraping and all the other tools that have a lower floor now). Self-serve gives these people claws in a fight they would have thought unwinnable before tools like Power BI gave them options.
>But this path is a catch-22. The more questions people can theoretically self-serve, the > >fewer they can practically self-serve. As you add more options, self-serve tools stop looking >like Mad Libs, and start looking like a blank document that requires people to write their own >stories in their entirety. While that’s what analysts want, it’s not what everyone wants.
this made me imagine a BI version of www.creedthoughts.gov.www\creedthoughts