Best Self-Service BI Tool Basics

The increasing complexity on decision making and the alarming necessity for a business intelligence tool led to the evolution of various Business Intelligent platforms. This blog walks through the necessity of BI tool and selecting the best Self-service BI tool. A self-service BI tool is trying to tell the business story, with the numbers being secondary to the overall plot and cast of characters in that story. These data stories can address a wide variety of questions such as "What happened to the dip in first-quarter profits in France?,"When did our market for this product really take off and what was the reason for it?," "Did the cost of our inventory destroy our gross margins last year?," and "What is happening in real time with my business?"

These and other questions are really at the heart of typical BI explorations and require more than just the numbers; they require an understanding of the business reasons behind them. A great BI tool will help you assemble a data-backed story, and show the root causes and solutions to a particular business problem.

Up until recently, BI was mostly for specialists. The tools were hard to operate and required a knowledge level akin to that of database administrators. Front-line business managers who desired BI-style insights either send query requests to BI specialists working in the IT department or, worse, had to wait for a monthly or even quarterly BI report that the IT department would release, filled with standard queries that were difficult to change or influence.

But all that's changed because advances in database and query technology (as well as intuitively redesigned front-end tools) have made it easier for average business folks to use BI tools under what is now being called "self-service BI." The idea behind self-service BI is that front-line business executives and managers should be able to quickly get up and running with these tools—without having a degree in statistics or a data analysis background. They should also be able to generate their own queries against corporate data sets without requiring IT as a middleman. In theory, these self-service BI tools should be as easy to use as is your typical spreadsheet.

Self-service BI in no way invalidates traditional database management or data scientists. The insights these professionals provide are complex to generate and they remain invaluable to most organizations. Instead, self-service BI attempts to generate new insights from front-line perspectives, realizing new value from hard-won data through more informal, ad hoc analysis.

SAP BI tool

SAP BI tool excellently helps the user to uncover various trends and connections in oceans of data – anytime, anywhere. Find instant answers to your business questions with the simplicity of a Web-based search, and get the context you need to improve decision making. Following are the exclusive self-service features offered by SAP BI tool.

•          Give all business user intuitive, self-service data exploration, and BI tools

•          Search and explore data from any device – online or offline

•          Use geo-location features and maps to add context to your findings

•          Make sense of your data with big picture insights – and drill into the details

•          Easily create dashboard views and data visualizations, and share them with your team