Self Service Business Intelligence: Some Downers
November 2, 2016
Perhaps I am looking at a skewed sample of write ups. I noted another downer about easy to use, do it yourself business intelligence systems. These systems allow anyone to derive high value insights from data with the click of a mouse.
That’s been a dream of some for many years. I recall that one of my colleagues at Halliburton NUS repeating to anyone who would listen to a civil engineer with a focus on wastewater say, “I want to walk into my office and have the computer tell me what I need to know today.”
Yep, how’s that coming along?
The write up “9 Ways Self Service BI Solutions Fall Short” suggests that that the comment made by the sewage expert in 1972 is not yet a reality. The write up identifies nine “reasons,” but I circled three as of particular interest to me and my research goslings. You will need to read the original “Fall Short” article for the full complement of downers or “challenges” in today’s parlance.
- Hidden complexity. Yep, folks who don’t know what they don’t know but just want a good enough answer struggle with the realities of data integrity, mathematics, and assumptions. A pretty chart may be eye catching and “simple”. But is it on point? Well, that’s part of the complexity which the pretty chart is doing its best to keep hidden. Out of sight, out of mind, right?
- Customization. Yep, the chart is pretty but it does not answer the question of a particular user. Now the plumbing must be disassembled in order to get what the self service BI user wants. Okay, but what if that self service user who is in a hurry cannot put the plumbing together again. Messy, right?
- Cost and scalability. The problem with self service is that low cost comes from standardization. You can have any color so long as it is black. The notion of mass customization persists even through every Apple iPhone is the same. The user has to figure out how to set up the phone to do what the user wants. The result is that most of the iPhone users make minimal changes to the software on the phone. Default settings are the setting for the vast majority of a system’s users. When a change has to be made, that change comes at a cost and neither users nor the accountants are too keen on the unique snowflake approach to hardware or software. The outputs from a BI system, therefore, get used with zero or minimal modifications.
What are the risks of self service business intelligence? These range from governmental flops like 18F to Google’s failure with its fiber play. Think of the inefficiency resulting from the use of business intelligence systems marketed as the answer to the employee’s need for on point information.
When I walk into my office, no system tells me what I need to know. Nice idea, though.
Stephen E Arnold, November 2, 2016
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