Self-Service BI: Empowering the Line-of-Business Manager

In the recent released report, entitled Self-Service BI: Empowering the Line-of-Business Manager, written by Michael Lock, Aberdeen Group found that top performers were able to drive higher adoption of their BI tools by eliminating or reducing IT involvement, and developing their top managers into analytically inclined decision makers. This report is based on direct feedback from 223 executives across the globe.

According the executive summary: "Today's Line-of-Business (LoB) managers need to make quicker decisions based on cleaner and more relevant information. Waiting for a report to make its way through an IT queue is no longer an option as timely decisions carry a higher business premium than ever before. LoB decision makers now require self-service access to their analytical solutions in order to stay abreast of market trends and react quicker to threats and opportunities. Aberdeen's research shows that Best-in-Class companies have a comprehensive strategy to develop their non-technical LoB managers into analytically inclined decision makers, spread business intelligence (BI) capability to more organizational functions, and drive significant internal and external business efficiencies as a result."

"Through training programs and leveraging cross-functional input from multiple lines-of-business, leading companies are able to create their own breed of 'power user'. This type of user is not an IT expert, a software developer, or a database administrator. The power user has the ability to create their own functional specific views and reports, can do ad-hoc discovery on their own data, and can generate self-service business insight from the tools at their disposal", wrote Lock.

You can obtain a complimentary copy of the report in the Aberdeen Group website. This Benchmark report is provided free for a limited time by its sponsors Noetix and SAP.

Increasingly there are companies intending to reduce or eliminate IT involvement in creating analytic applications, and vendors are offering a path around IT, mainly through Web 2.0-Oriented BI Tools, enabling business users to create their own BI applications.