Self-service Business Intelligence

When I was employed as a Business Intelligence (BI) architect in 2009, I attended an interview at a major Houston corporation for a comparable position. At that time, the organization was utilizing the most advanced BI tool available on the market. Based on their licensing model, it would have been a $1.5-2M investment in acquiring the BI licenses for the organization. The hiring manager, who was the manager of the BI team, informed me during my second interview that the BI team consists of over a dozen BI developers. I inquired of the BI manager, "Do your organization's business users not generate their own reports?" out of curiosity. The BI manager responded, "We lack confidence in the ability of our users to build their own reports." Additionally, the manager stated, "Business users should never create their own reports; this is not their responsibility, rather it is the responsibility of IT to build reports for them." The manager then inquired, "Do your organization's business users create their own reports?" I stated that I am the sole BI specialist on the data warehousing team, which serves over 2100 business business users across the entire enterprise. My users build their reports and dashboards themselves.

Moving forward to the year 2024, the issue continues to endure. Despite the fact that organizations invest millions of dollars in BI tools, only BI developers utilize them to generate reports and dashboards for business users. Implementations of BI tools in this manner result in the delivery of user insights via a ticketing system. When a user requires a report, they are required to submit a support ticket for IT to generate the report, a process that can take several weeks. Typically, the business user who requires the solution to a critical business problem cannot wait weeks for it. As a result, business users utilize Excel and Microsoft Access as alternatives to the BI tool. This results in additional "versions of the truth" and non-IT-managed data sources, which contributes to the IT debt that will eventually require resolution.