Logi Analytics has released findings from its second annual “State of Self-Service BI” report, focused on how businesses users and IT professionals view and use self-service business intelligence (BI) tools today. The report once again shows that 91 percent of IT and business users agree self-service analytics tools are essential. However, adoption of these tools remains stagnant, with less than a quarter of business users (22 percent) reporting they have access to and use self-service BI tools when they need it – the same disappointing percentage reported in 2014.
To boost adoption, the vast majority (95 percent) of IT organizations plan to invest in self-service BI in the next 2 years, which is up 11 percent from 2014. But compared to 2014, they won’t simply invest in enhancing existing tools or implementing new ones: the top area for investment is end user training. By shifting focus to improving people and processes, IT can work around their limited budgets and still address gaps in user skill sets, which has been noted as an obstacle to self-service BI.
“Creating a data-driven culture takes a lot more than just providing users with a self-service BI tool. Fundamentally changing the way people work and the associated adoption of these tools cannot happen overnight. Moreover, as individuals needs and roles within organizations can vary widely, IT needs a deeper understanding of their skill sets in order to be successful,” said Alvin Wong, lead author and product marketing manager, for Logi Analytics. “The good news is, our research indicates that organizations recognize that in addition to selecting appropriate tools, they must include training on the tools as well as the data so users can become more self-sufficient and data driven.”
Additional Report Highlights:
- Business flexibility drives need for self-service – The biggest driver for self-service remains the flexibility it gives business users to get things on their own time. This year, business users also report that it helps support the over-arching desire for organizations to become more data-driven. Criticisms of IT, which traditionally include long response times and their lack of resources, are still present, but are not the primary drivers for self-service.
- Self-service BI liberates IT – Self-service doesn’t just empower business users. On average, self-service BI reduces IT requests by 47 percent, up from 37 percent in 2014, strengthening the case for IT to make further investments in user adoption. Moreover, this reduction in requests will allow IT to be more strategic in the use of their ever shrinking resources.
- Marketing is the most underserved department – 63 percent of business users in marketing said self-service BI is very important to their job, the highest of all departments. However, only 9 percent was very satisfied, the lowest of all departments. The huge gap in satisfaction shows the struggles of a typical business user community struggling to grow more data-driven.
- Data complexity reigns in self-service – In 2014, 51 percent of business users said that they had access to all the data and information they needed without asking IT. This year, only 43% of users reported having access to everything they needed. The decrease suggests that the need for more data coming from more sources and the complexity of pulling it all together has made business users more reliant on IT for their self-service needs.
