What does easy to use really mean?
Everyone agrees that BI (business intelligence) needs to be “easy”. But what really defines easy? And easy for whom: technical implementation and support teams, analysts and report writers or business management and decision makers?
With all due respect, the bar is set pretty low to make things easier for technical teams—traditional BI tools are so complex to implement and maintain that there are whole industries of consultants who specialize in tool-specific services. And the same can be said of the analyst and reporting staff, whose roles and job security, as I’ve said before, are defined by the gap between data and decision making. The real challenge is making BI tools easy enough but still meaningful enough for business people to use.
What decision makers require is:
- Access to live data in a form that exposes pertinent information, patterns and anomalies at-a-glance
- Capability to then ask follow-on questions based on what is identified (i.e. is that still an outlier if we look at historical performance or just in this category over this last period?)
- Capability to document and share findings and insights
- Reduced reliance on analyst and IT grunt work
-Angela Shen-Hsieh
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