Self-Service Business Intelligence: McDonaldization of Data

January 20, 2011

Drive into McDonald’s. Hear a recorded message about a special. Issue order. Get Big Mac and lots of questionable commercial food output. Leave.

Yep, business intelligence and “I’m loving it.”

No one pays much attention to the food production system and even less to what happens between the cow’s visit to the feedlot and the All American meal.

Ah, self-service. Convenience. Speed. Ease of use. Yes!

These days we pump our own gas (minus Oregon and NJ) and pour our own soft drinks. We Google instead of asking the reference librarian (usually).

Is this the future of Business Intelligence? “Soon Self-Service BI, SaaS to Dominate the Tech World” predicts that 2011 will bring an increase in self-service BI. According to SiliconIndia News: “Numerous vendors, including IBM, SAP, Information Builders, Tibco Software, QlikTech, and Tableau Software, already offer [self-service BI] tools, and adoption will accelerate as more companies try to deliver BI capabilities to nontechnical users, business analysts, and others.” The question becomes: Will the users know what the outputs mean? The SaaS part of the prediction I heartily agree with, in BI and everywhere else.

What if the data are dirty? Malformed? Selected to present a particular view of the Big Mac world? How about that user experience?

Alice Wasielewski, January 20, 2011

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Business intelligence, Database, News, User experience

Comments

One Response to “Self-Service Business Intelligence: McDonaldization of Data”

Wayne Morris on February 11th, 2011 11:59 am

Alice
I believe Self-service BI is the future for delivering value quickly, directly to business people. You’ve raised good questions, and I think a combination of intuitive interfaces, embedded knowledge and guidance, context setting and “every person” analytics that are self explanatory are important to good decision making.

Automated data management and maintenance (using meta-data synchronization, quarantines and aliases) is also important to ensure that decisions are made on quality data.

Search the site
Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive

Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.