by Angela Guess
Pedro Arellano recently wrote in IT Pro Portal, “When rolling out analytics services to teams within a business, it’s important to bear in mind that there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach that can work for everyone. In the past, traditional BI implementations were limited to specific reports that were created and used by analysts for the management team, while any ad hoc report requests were filtered through these specialists, as well. The users involved in BI were small in number and knew exactly what they wanted to produce.”
He continues, “Contrast this with today. Business units want to use data for their own decision-making purposes and won’t put up with delays in getting access to the reports that they use for these decisions. If central BI or analytics teams can’t or won’t support them, then they can and will acquire their own tools for analysing data. According to the firm’s Magic Quadrant report for Business Intelligence and Analytics, Gartner sees this changing the BI market landscape and has assumed that most business users will adopt self-service analytics tools that can prepare and visualise data by 2018.”
Arellano goes on, “This shift opens up data for individuals, but it also represents a dilemma for central IT. Should we let each department run with their own solutions or look to take care of their requirements like before, only faster? From a data governance perspective, letting self-service take place without guide rails in place on what and how data is used can lead to potential problems.”
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