LocationsDuring lunch at last month’s Gartner BI Summit, Microsoft presented an overview of their new PowerPivot product. As they showed its capabilities, you could see the look of concern spread across the faces of IT managers in the audience. Their furrowed eyebrows seemed to say, Great, something else that can spread like wildfire and create more information silos—just when we thought we had business users reigned in and had done away with their under-the-desk ‘shadow apps.’ Now we’ll never get one version of the truth.
But, like it or not, the meteoric rise of “self-serve” Business Intelligence tools (like Qlickview, Tableau Software, and PowerPivot) shows that these tools are not going away—and maybe that’s not such a bad thing. In fact, I would argue that these new tools will actually be good for the adoption and overall growth and maturity of Business Intelligence in many organizations.
While these tools aren’t a substitute for dimensional modeling, they do serve a purpose and help to drive more investment in projects that show a greater ROI; they serve as a foundation for better collaboration between business and IT by giving the business users tools that help them access data and build their own reports. Looking at how these tools are used, allows IT to get a better understanding of what the business truly wants to measure and can make better investment decisions around data warehousing and decision support systems to serve a broader audience.
For example, let’s say I’m the manager of customer service and I decide the enterprise Business Intelligence tool I’m using doesn’t give me all of the information I’m looking for. Perhaps I’ve seen a 20% drop in customers over the last year—I need to find out why they are leaving. Using my CRM and some Pivot Tables, I can spin up some quick reports that bring in other data sources that I think might be relevant to the recent changes.
If my analysis shows a strong correlation between the loss of my customers and (for instance) a new competitor opening in my region, then I probably want to bring that data into more of a main stream environment and share it across the organization. If the drop seems primarily related to the change in economy, I probably don’t need to invest in a more tightly and costly integrated solution that brings the new data source into my centralized data warehouse. In this scenario, a few simple self-service tools could provide a rapid solution to help me understand some changes in my business (without bothering the busy folks in IT) as well as a barometer on what data/reporting needs should be brought into a more formalized reporting framework.
So there’s no need to be afraid of the more powerful self-service tools. Used correctly, they don’t take the place of data warehousing or integrated intelligence models—they simply help make informed decisions about larger Business Intelligence solutions.
If you’d like to learn more about how to establish a framework for successfully integrating these tools into your current BI environment, contact me at brianh@projectlineinc.com. We’d love to help.