“Self-service BI” is a bit of a watchword these days, and certainly one that we’ve been taking a long hard look at from a marketing standpoint because it describes pretty neatly what SMI Suite is and does, and draws a nice dividing line that separates out the sort of BI that requires written reports in triplicate and fifteen different meetings with the “BI specialists” before you can get your hands on a simple report.

So it was with much interest that I read James Kobielus’ piece on Self-Service Business Intelligence: Dissolving the Barriers to Creative Decision-Support Solutions.

The whole piece is of interest, but the first paragraph struck a resounding note:

Self-service is all the rage in the world of business intelligence (BI), but it’s no fad. In fact, it’s the only way to make BI more pervasive, delivering insights into every decision—important or mundane—that drives your business. It’s the key to empowering users with actionable insights while removing many mundane BI development and maintenance tasks from IT’s crushing workload.

I think we probably need to hire James to sell SMI Suite for us, because what he’s talking about is exactly the same thing we’ve been banging on about for years: operational BI is not (or, at least, should not) be about the same dry reports run week in, week out. It should be about spotting a trend, or spike, or glitch in a particular report and then immediately running off to run a slightly different report that zeros in on that one particular detail. And then spotting a spike in that report and starting the whole process again. It should be about exploring the complexity of the data and about the data inspiring you to want to understand more about where it comes from and what it means. That’s the key to BI being a truly effective tool for saving money, working more efficiently, improving customer satisfaction and all the other things that we all strive to do every single day.

And as James so succinctly points out, self-service is at the heart of that concept.

Tom