Business analysts often have to go through a lot of data when making critical decisions that could affect the enterprise. To save time and enhance productivity, there are self-service BI tools they can use that will enhance their ability to generate reports from many different data sources and show the aggregated data effectively to the stakeholders. Self-service business intelligence and reporting tools typically come with ad-hoc capabilities, and the best platforms enable an easier way to connect to multiple sources of data, define policies for data access, and build powerful data dashboards and SQL charts.
The self-service BI may be just what your business needs to boost performance and encourage proper collaboration among stakeholders and business analysts. It promotes independence to users as it eliminates the need to work with an IT team at all times. Without it, users are at the mercy of IT specialists when they need to access data securely. With self-serving business intelligence reporting tools, they can connect quickly to the data sources, build or write SQL queries, create charts and dashboards, and produce reports to be shared with others immediately. This way, critical decisions can be made much faster.
A good self-service BI comes with a comprehensive ad-hoc reporting solution that enables IT to generate a data access control policy. This way, they can rest easy when enabling access to business users who need immediate access to data. The ad-hoc feature supports SQL charts and data dashboards, both of which can already be generated and edited by users directly from the platform. Likewise, it makes it easier to visualize and determine data with dashboards, which can be built with a drag-and-drop function.
Secure and easy collaboration is another advantage to using a self-service BI. Ad-hoc reports, dashboards, and d3 based charts can easily be shared to others via links or emails, and the responsive design of the dashboard enables users to explore dashboards from their mobile devices, using a browser. Password-protected links can be implemented, as well as data with expiration dates.
