Self-Service BI vs. Traditional BI

The facilities within the BI environment enable BI users to become more self-reliant and less dependent on the IT organization. These facilities focus on four main objectives: easier access to source data for reporting and analysis, easier and improved support for data analysis features, faster deployment options such as appliances and cloud computing, and simpler, customizable, and collaborative end-user interfaces.

Short comes of Traditional BI Tools

1. Technology is around 20 years old.
2. The architecture was based on hardware limitations like limited memory, and CPU which was very scary when Architecture for Traditional BI was designed.
3. Traditional BI Tools are based on Aggregations, Filters & Disk Space access, so the inherent problem with these BI Tools is very old Architecture which results in a very complex set of technologies to support a very old Architecture.
4. The Problem with Traditional systems is that they cannot exploit In-Memory, Multi-Thread, or Multi-Core computing.
5. Dimensions are decided at the time of designing the View, structure.
6. Has a pre-defined view of the data.
7. Data is aggregated even before the data is viewed by the Business User, rather than when the question is raised.

Power of Self-Service:

1. In-memory is useful when used with Advance Technologies like using Memory instead of Disk for any operation.
2. Associative Search: Operations like aggregation, Summing total are performed on the fly.
3. Productivity: Self-service BI tools increase productivity by decreasing longer turnaround times often found when there is a need to go through multiple business departments such as IT operations.
4. Flexibility: Each end user may be asking different questions, and looking for different answers. With flexible in-memory acceleration, users are able to create reports and answer questions for themselves, rather than having an IT department create reports for each question/user.
5. Scalability: BI tools are not just for the big players in business anymore. Using self-service options, BI becomes more affordable and available for smaller companies. IBM, reviewing the rise of personal, mobile, and social BI, added “BI software has historically been the domain of larger enterprises – mainly due to skill, time and cost required to implement, but today it’s being used by businesses of all sizes.”
6. Predictability: Predictive analytics is playing a pivotal role in business operations today. The ability to perform real-time “what-if” analyses throughout a workday creates a self-sufficient, informed workforce.

Conclusion: Can both Self-Service vs. Conventional BI co-exist?

Many enterprises have invested a large amount in Traditional BI, it will be difficult to rip off and replace, which will give no value to their investments. Ideally, they could both co-exist so let’s take an example where a Company has invested a lot in Data-warehouses and IT Infrastructure or maybe a data management layer then tools like Tableau can sit on top of the data management layer and help in Analysing and Visualisation of data in the best possible way as compared to Conventional BI.

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