Why Is Self-service BI Important?
Self-service Business Intelligence (BI) is an aspect of data analytics that makes it possible for companies to get access to data and explore it easily. They don't have to be experts in business intelligence or related fields like statistical analysis or data mining. Self-service BI software helps companies in the filtering, sorting as well as analyzing and visualizing company specific data.
Using the data gathered from BI systems companies empower their employees, from frontline staff to senior executives, to get hold of valuable business insights. Self-service BI's main aim is to help businesses make good business decisions. This leads to benefits like greater efficiency, increased customer satisfaction as well as bigger revenues for the business.
Below we will discuss the benefits of self-service BI in greater detail:
1. Quicker Decisions
Self-service business intelligence enables businesses to make decisions quickly and more effectively. This is because it allows end users to create their own reports using the data available in the system.
Self-service BI also helps save time and resource costs by taking away the need for IT staff members and other business intelligence experts who would otherwise have been required to handle this task.
This means that decision-makers can make data-driven decisions faster, which will help them be more effective. As businesses become increasingly data-driven, self-service BI can help them stay competitive in today's competitive market.
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“Flexible product with great training and support. The product has been very useful for quickly creating dashboards and data views. Support and training has always been available to us and quick to respond.
- George R, Information Technology Specialist at Sonepar USA
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2. Improves Productivity
Self-service BI allows you to make better decisions. If you're working on a project and need to make a decision, it's often difficult for your team members to gather all the information required for an informed decision. You can use self-service BI tools in order to ensure that everyone has access to all the relevant data from one central repository, which will enable them to make more informed decisions than they would have been able to before. This makes them more productive which has direct impact on the company's revenues.
For example using self-service BI you can look at your dashboard and see which channel converts customers better. Say you have different marketing campaigns like PPC ad campaigns (Google/Facebook ads or sponsored LinkedIn posts), organic search engine marketing, influencer marketing, etc. You can tell which of these is performing better than the other. With that information you can tweak your keywords, add or reduce your ad spend, change/keep influencers with the aim of converting more customers.
3. Helps save time and resource costs
Self-service BI is important because it helps you:
- Reduce the need for IT to create reports for end users.
- Reduce the need for IT to create and maintain dashboards.
- Reduce the need for IT to create and maintain apps.
Self-service BI also reduces costs by eliminating an additional layer of bureaucracy between data and analysts, which saves time in creating connections between different systems or platforms, as well as reducing errors due to manual workarounds.
With self-service BI, you can improve decision-making by giving your employees access to key performance indicators (KPIs) and other important metrics through easy-to-use dashboards.
Due to the little time required to make important decisions businesses can respond to changes in the market faster helping them remain competitive. It also means that you have access to the information you need when you need it—which means being able to make better decisions based on what's happening right now instead of relying on old information.
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Read how InetSoft saves money and resources with deployment flexibility. |
4. Allows end users to create their own reports
No need of waiting for specialized IT staff, data or statistical analysts to create reports especially where speed and agility are important.
Consider the following scenario: You've created a new report, but you need to customize it to match your organization's data. Or perhaps you have an app that's been used by several people within your organization, but they all want different functionality out of it. With the help of self-service BI tools, end users can make these changes themselves and see the results immediately.
5. Gives end users access to accurate data
Accurate data is needed to make more informed business decisions. It helps businesses make better decisions, improve processes and ROI, as well as improve customer experience. Business data and information can come from various sources like spreadsheets, databases, legacy systems, social media feeds, weblogs, and more. The problem is that most of this data isn't accurate enough for making business decisions. This is where self-service BI comes into play: It helps businesses get their hands on accurate business data that is company specific which can be used to make better decisions.
As a result of this everyone in the business gets to understand the customer better. What does the customer need? What are the customer's pain points? Such information helps the company to deliver services that are tailor-made to solve the customers' problems. So in essence self-service BI dashboards can help businesses reduce churn. They can see when customers stop using their product/subscribing to their service. Such information is important as it helps business take corrective action faster to prevent further loss of customers. If for example, a company uses tickets to offer customer support, the management can through a quick glance tell which tickets are taking longer than usual to resolve and find solutions quickly.
Conclusion
Self-service BI is becoming more important because it allows organizations to work with data in a way that's more intuitive and natural. It helps improve the quality of decision-making throughout the business, which will lead to better results for your customers.
As mentioned above self-service BI is also important because it allows businesses to gain data insights faster. In a world of constant change and rapid innovation, self-service BI gives users the ability to access their own data more quickly than ever before. This means that you can use your data in real-time rather than waiting for someone else to provide you with information from a report or other source. This helps your business to remain competitive in an ever changing business environment.