Posts Tagged ‘Self-service BI’

Embracing Data Visualization: What Is a Self-service BI System?

Written by Islam Salahuddin on December 15, 2021. Posted in Articles, Operational performance

Gone are the days when analyzing and visualizing data to get information was a job that was limited to the IT and business intelligence (BI) divisions. Gone also are the days when the sole possession of knowledge, skills, and tools for data processing was in the hands of the “data guy.”

Data is becoming more and more abundant and essential for various business operations. This makes centralizing data processing on one or two divisions an inevitable bottleneck. On the other hand, analytics and visualization tools are becoming easier to use, with more intuitive user-friendly interfaces that require less and less technical expertise.

What SSBI Is About

Self-service business intelligence (SSBI), also called self-service data exploration, has become an important approach for data-driven insights in business. It means giving the ability to the wide range of employees who are not experienced with data to drive insights from relevant datasets and create exploratory visualizations to help them better understand the data and to use it in reports. It’s also a part of what is called data democratization if you’d like another fancy term on the plate.

It should be, however, distinguished from the second approach called dashboarding. While the latter should still be the responsibility of the experienced BI team, turning amounts of data to finely curated reports on the most important KPIs within a well-developed narrative can happen. The SSBI approach aims to:

Avoid time delays in data-driven decision making among the low and mid-level teams that may happen due to the centralization of analytics responsibilities.
Minimize intuition-based decisions that can be made by low and mid-level teams on a daily basis due to lack of analytical capabilities.
Enhance internal communication within the teams by making data-driven insights and visualizations easier to generate, and therefore more frequent integration of reports.
Enhance external communication of the organization as the insights and visualizations can also be easily used in developing publications, like blog posts for example.

Google Sheets and Datawrapper

There are tons of visualization tools out there that can enable you to create an SSBI system for your organization, some of which are technologically advanced, but each has its best uses and downfalls.

Just like Google Sheets and Datawrapper. The advantages of using these tools are the following:

– Businesses with no capabilities of experienced teams or infrastructure can implement the system.

– Anyone can use it as it requires little to no technical expertise.

– Visualizations can be easily duplicated and edited, suiting fast-based work routines.

– Visualizations can be easily well-formatted and laid out, leading to efficient reporting.

– Generate both interactive and static visualizations that are suitable for embedding in various forms of reports, from web-based all the way to paper-based.

Using a self-service BI solution can help streamline operations and support critical decisions. It also encourages collaboration, simplifies daily business needs, and increases one’s competitive advantage. With the efficiency brought by SSBI, businesses can focus on what matters most to them.

Want to understand how visual representations can support the decision making process and allow quick transmission of information? Sign up for The KPI Institute’s Data Visualization Certification course.