{"id":16118,"date":"2013-08-21T12:54:00","date_gmt":"2013-08-21T19:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/devwww.3cloudsolutions.com\/post\/the-role-of-power-users-in-a-self-service-bi-initiative-2\/"},"modified":"2024-01-08T11:34:06","modified_gmt":"2024-01-08T19:34:06","slug":"the-role-of-power-users-in-a-self-service-bi-initiative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3cloudsolutions.com\/resources\/the-role-of-power-users-in-a-self-service-bi-initiative\/","title":{"rendered":"The Role of Power Users in a Self-Service BI Initiative"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Defining Self-Service Business Intelligence<\/h2>\n

For many organizations, Self-Service Business Intelligence<\/a> (BI) is emerging as a larger segment of the business intelligence and analytics environment.\u00a0 The extremely high interest in Power Pivot alone is an excellent indicator that Self-Service BI is growing.\u00a0 Gartner defines Self-Service BI as:\u00a0 \u201cEnd users designing and deploying their own reports and analyses within an approved and supported architecture and tools portfolio.\u201d\u00a0 This statement from Gartner implies a partnership between business units and IT which is sometimes referred to as \u201cManaged\u201d Self-Service BI.\u00a0 Although the business can go it alone, a strong collaboration with the technical teams can help to ensure systems can support the volume and variation of self-service query activity, monitor the quality and integrity of the data, and maintain data security.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Typically Self-Service BI augments an existing Corporate BI environment for purposes such as small projects, prototyping, or infrequent analyses.\u00a0 Self-Service BI empowers a segment of\u00a0business users, often referred to as power users, to become producers of information for others to consume.\u00a0 The following image is a simplified depiction of a consolidated structure which integrates Corporate BI and Self-Service BI into one managed BI Portal.<\/p>\n

\"PowerUsers<\/p>\n

Factors in the Growth of Self-Service BI<\/h3>\n

One significant reason that Self-Service BI is becoming more prevalent is because the Corporate BI environment cannot always react fast enough to support the needs of business users.\u00a0 For instance, even a small new request might involve changes to table structure, data load process, cube or semantic layer, and reports, all of which typically require a testing cycle and formal change management process before it can be promoted to the production Corporate BI environment.\u00a0 If the new request is related to a one-time analysis, such as whether to open a new store or extend store hours, it may be far more practical and time-effective for the business to act independently.\u00a0 If the result is required almost immediately, then the business may have virtually no choice but to conduct the analysis independently.<\/p>\n

Another big factor driving Self-Service BI growth is that IT is often lacking in-depth knowledge of the data and subject areas.\u00a0 It is a bit of a fine art to gather BI requirements which result in a high level of accuracy with few iterations.\u00a0 The business users who possess domain knowledge and technical aptitude will be well-equipped going forward in this new era.<\/p>\n

An additional factor is the ever-increasing variety of data sources.\u00a0 When business users become accustomed to data-driven decision-making, they become eager for more and more types of data which leads to consumption of data outside the Corporate BI environment.\u00a0 Newer tools such as Power Query are making it easier and easier for business users to find and work with data sources from outside the organization.<\/p>\n

Types of Power Users<\/h3>\n

The role of power users in a Self-Service BI initiative can mean many things.\u00a0 Power users are often the first to adopt new functionality, sometimes even before the corporate IT department is prepared to support it.\u00a0 Power users can be an invaluable source of domain knowledge.\u00a0 They can also be great advocates for BI tools and techniques, which can\u00a0translate to\u00a0a big impact on user adoption and satisfaction.\u00a0 In some organizations, power users act as the first line of support for business users in their functional area.<\/p>\n

Within IT, we sometimes refer to Self-Service BI users generally as power users. However, in reality there can be extremely different functions performed by one power user versus another.\u00a0 Although it is difficult to define roles precisely, the following image offers one way to categorize the types of Self-Service BI users.<\/p>\n

\"PowerUsers<\/p>\n

As the image above shows, not all power users have equivalent needs.\u00a0 There are different categories of Self-Service BI users because needs and technical capabilities vary considerably.\u00a0 The level of interest business users have in working directly with the data varies wildly \u2013 it\u2019s not that they are incapable of working with things like data models, calculations, and relationships \u2013 it\u2019s that many functional users don\u2019t have an interest or natural aptitude.\u00a0 Some information workers really just want to create reports and dashboards and analytical models using readily available data.<\/p>\n

A smaller group of power users prefers to work directly with the raw data, including integration from various sources.\u00a0 A typical example of data integration is to merge corporate sales data with external data such as economic data, demographics data, weather conditions data, or industry measurements purchased from a third party.<\/p>\n

A further subset of power users may expand on that a bit further with some level of light ETL (Extract>Transform>Load) processes to manipulate, cleanse, and\/or alter the data structures.\u00a0 Finally, there are very proficient and technically adept power users who handle complex analytics, data mining, and\/or the exploration of big data.<\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/h4>\n

Whether Self-Service business intelligence<\/a> is a specific organizational initiative, or more of a grassroots evolution, it’s likely to continue gaining a presence in many organizations.\u00a0 There are a great many Self-Service BI capabilities available in Office, Office 365, SQL Server, and SharePoint that your organization may be able to incorporate in order to support the varying needs, abilities, and preferences of power users.<\/p>\n

Next we will introduce specific Microsoft BI capabilities for creation of reports and dashboards, data models, data integration and cleansing, statistical analysis, predictive analytics, as well as analysis of geospatial, unstructured, and streaming data.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For many organizations, Self-Service BI is emerging as a larger segment of the business intelligence and analytics environment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":15031,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[394,260],"tags":[305],"class_list":["post-16118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business-intelligence","category-data-ai","tag-modern-bi","topics-blog"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3cloudsolutions.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3cloudsolutions.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3cloudsolutions.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3cloudsolutions.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3cloudsolutions.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/3cloudsolutions.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16118\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3cloudsolutions.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15031"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3cloudsolutions.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3cloudsolutions.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3cloudsolutions.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}