There has been a drive by increasingly technically savvy business teams to perform self-service analysis on the business information that they intimately know in terms of element relationships and business rules. At the same time these business teams do not want to involve their IT counterparts in all steps of the analysis. The primary reason for this drive is simply the overhead required in terms of time and resources to involve IT in generating critical information that drive business decisions. If business teams could get their hands on tools that allow them pull information in from the data repositories and allow them to do the analysis they need fast and in an easy, non-technically daunting manner, the value of such tools is easily bought by business sponsors. Of course, in no way does this imply that IT is redundant, IT has to be involved in the enterprise reporting level and to maintain the infrastructure that supports the so-called local departmental analytics, and they will always be brought into picture when a certain local analysis is so critical that it needed to be “productionalized” and deployed to a larger audience.
Unfortunately, thus far such “magic” self-service tools that business teams could master and use locally did not exist, or if they did they were either in spreadsheet formats with restricted analysis capabilities, or embedded inside of bigger complex software suites and therefore were cost prohibitive. The fast response times from such local applications where the business user wanted results rather than waiting for response prompts from the reporting applications were absent as well.
