Data Makes the World Go 'Round

Chapter 9The Self-service Imperative

In this chapter, we will examine the following:

• What democratizing analytics is all about—and why it matters
• Why BI democratization is important for the AI journey
• Why organizations struggle with democratization

In Part II we discussed the data foundation required for AI. That same foundation is important for analytics (although it may not need to be as robust). In the next few chapters, we take a brief but critical detour to explore how organizations can democratize analytics and build the literacy needed to support it. Most companies now provide BI tools so employees can derive insights from data, yet ease-of-use alone isn’t enough. A governed data foundation enables self-service analytics and helps employees learn how to work with data, strengthening organizational, data, and governance readiness for AI.

What Democratizing Analytics Is All About—And Why It Matters

The concept of democratizing BI, i.e., making it available to business users who need it, has been around since the early 2000s. The idea behind it was to remove the barriers to getting access to the data for BI and provide the tools needed for people to easily answer their own business questions.

Of course, many business users have been using spreadsheets (and continue to do so) to answer their questions; however, the spreadsheet typically provides the ability to analyze a piece of the data. They act off siloed data, which as we have seen can cause problems with data consistency, ...