Self-Service Workflows: Curate, Create, Consume

This article and others in the series are excerpts from an upcoming report on self-service analytics. They also form the basis of a half-day course that Wayne Eckerson teaches at TDWI conferences.

The challenge with self-service analytics is giving business users the right amount of freedom to meet their own information needs. Too much freedom spawns data silos and distrust. Too little freedom creates backlogs and frustration, causing business users to circumvent IT entirely. (See “Self-Service Analytics: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?”)

What’s needed is a blend of self-service and governance that maps to the way both organizations and people work. There needs to be both iterative and bi-directional workflows to ensure that business users get the right information at the right time and organizations can maintain a clear, coherent data dialect that everybody understands and trusts.

These workflows need to accommodate different user needs for information and access. Not all users need the same level of self-service. (See “One Size Does Not Fit All.”) In fact, the vast majority of users (~90%) don’t need self-service at all—or at least, not self-service in the traditional sense. What they need is “silver service”—highly tailored reports and dashboards populated with curated data—in other words, business intelligence (BI) served on a “silver platter.”

Contrary to what many vendors proselytize, the goal of BI is to minimize the need for self-service, not maximize its use. Most business users are not hired to crunch data and design reports and dashboards. If they do, it’s by necessity, not desire.

The goal of BI is to minimize the need for self-service, not maximize its use.

A well-designed BI environment with iterative and bi-directional workflows allows casual users to consume information quickly so they can do their jobs, not spend nights and weekends crafting custom reports. And it leaves the dirty work of preparing and designing reports to data scientists, data analysts, and IT professionals who are hired to do such work. (See figure 1.)

Read More