Self-Service Business Intelligence

Abstract

In recent years, Business Intelligence (BI) systems have undergone two distinctly different fundamental changes. On the one hand, social media systems, machine sensors, devices like smart phones, and other sources generate new data which often differ from traditional operational data regarding their structure, rate of growth, and volume (McAfee and Brynjolfsson 2012). On the other hand, the scope of BI has been extended from strategic questions to operational tasks so that more employees have a need to apply BI (Bohringer et al. 2010). These developments have created more demand for BI reporting and pattern search. In addition, the frequency of requests for changes by businesses has also increased (Yu et al. 2013). Consequently, BI specialists who are either IT professionals or experienced BI users in functional departments (so called power users) has become an even bigger bottleneck than before (Kobielus 2009). Unexperienced users (so called casual users) who need to make time-critical business decisions sometimes act, therefore, without exploiting all available data (Abello et al. 2013). In response to these developments, the approach of Self-Service BI (SSBI) has been suggested (e.g., Imhoff and White 2011). SSBI should, on one hand, empower casual users to perform custom analytics and to derive actionable information from large amounts of multifaceted data without having to involve BI specialists. Power users, on the other hand, can accomplish their tasks with SSBI more easily and quickly than before. Or, in Eckerson’s words (2009): ‘‘users create exactly the reports they want, when they want them...’’. The description of this term does not reveal the difference to the goals of traditional BI systems, but SSBI systems offer new features to accomplish the goals. One new option that will be described below in more detail can serve as an example: in some SSBI applications, business users (casual or power users) are enabled to integrate external data (e.g., from social networks) with data in the data warehouse and analyze them ‘‘on the fly.’’ SSBI also takes advantage of new software architectures as explained below. The desire to let business users access enterprise data has existed for a long time. SQL was partly developed with this goal in mind (Codd 1974). It indeed made the access easier, but mainly for programmers. The next attempt was undertaken with the introduction of data warehouses (Devlin 1996). This enabled power users to retrieve data and build reports or models by themselves. Meanwhile, more users experience the need to analyze data quickly and independently. While the goals of traditional BI have not changed, in SSBI the computing environment and new tools can fulfill promises and meet the users’ needs. The first step in this direction was taken when BI architecture changed from client/server applications to Web applications. In this architecture, client software installations for new users (and updates for old users) are no longer necessary, users can access the resources through an interface Accepted after one revision by Prof. Dr. Sinz.