Well, most self-service analysts I met, mixed statistical correllations with causation quite blindly. One needs to have a plenty of common sense before making judgements about the data. Otherwise dynamics of floods of Danuba will be considered cause of change in quantity of students in Budapest, or vice versa.
The Myth of Self-Service Analytics
21–29 of 29 posts
Re: The Myth of Self-Service Analytics
#22I work in business intelligence, and my understanding of "self-service BI" has never been "no developer needed at any point" or even "unskilled knowledge work". I have always approached it as a particular environment. Specifically, BI team must produce the appropriate data lakes and interfaces to support user-driven design and simple aggregations. The BI team would model the data, optimize for analytical speed, apply…
> I haven't encountered sales pitches with level of deceit claimed by the author. Get along to a Microsoft sales presso on Power BI for that.
What would be an example of this deceit?
Re: The Myth of Self-Service Analytics
#23An article about myth that contains no evidence ? I keep reading opinions about data science, where are the findings?
Re: The Myth of Self-Service Analytics
#24Many good points. Nevertheless self-service analytics is the only way to give business users what they need in a reasonable time frame. We've already seen what happens when every little change request has to be implemented by IT people -- time to production becomes weeks and months, instead of hours. Perhaps, there should be some kind of framework with reasonable restrictions and simplifications. But that's a very op…
There are other ways - for example if IT is embedded in a team and works hand in hand with them for a sprint rather than via change requests and so on.
Re: The Myth of Self-Service Analytics
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I haven't encountered sales pitches with level of deceit claimed by the author. Get along to a Microsoft sales presso on Power BI for that.
What would be an example of this deceit?
I am interested in this as well. Power BI is head and shoulders above anyone else in BI at the moment and I have never seen them make any deceitful claims. Every time it's "easy, but for advanced functionality you need DAX".
They are underselling it if anything, since it just punches so far beyond it's price point that most people who need entry-level BI would not understand how much of a good deal it is.
Self service means that you don't need to go through corporate IT, not that you need grand total of 0 dev skills. And even then, those tools abstract a lot of dev work. In the PowerBI case, DAX feels intuitive to anyone with Excel formulas experience. Other vendors have similar tooling.
Re: The Myth of Self-Service Analytics
#26The most used BI tool out there, Excel, is self service and it has been so for at least 30 years now. SSBI is not about taking people out, it is about empowering them with the right tools. Tableau, for instance, is nothing more than an Excel 2.0 and nobody I know, not even Tableau salesguys, says we will get all our analytics automagically, very far from that. Every department in Corporations is struggling to find people that are good with data, every department. Also, data analytics comes at the very end, again, nobody is saying your data strategy (blending, complex calcs, etc.) will be autogenerated, this would be crazy talk. You should consider SSBI more like what happened to mainframes and PCs, where the key to success was empowering more and more humans.
Re: The Myth of Self-Service Analytics
#27I work for a company making a "self-service analytics" tool, but we don't sell it as a "magical analytics" tool that does everything for you. Rather, we see it as a "you don't have to involve the IT department" tool for those quick jobs that analysts or other knowledgeable people would ideally like to do themselves, but can't due to lack of tools. To me, what is wrongly called self-service analytics is often really s…
Off topic, but whats the advantage of Transdata over Alteryx?
We support "ragged" data (ie non-rectangular) and are a lot cheaper.
Re: The Myth of Self-Service Analytics
#28Many good points. Nevertheless self-service analytics is the only way to give business users what they need in a reasonable time frame. We've already seen what happens when every little change request has to be implemented by IT people -- time to production becomes weeks and months, instead of hours. Perhaps, there should be some kind of framework with reasonable restrictions and simplifications. But that's a very op…
There are other ways - for example if IT is embedded in a team and works hand in hand with them for a sprint rather than via change requests and so on.
That's usually the best way to organize BI teams. The problem with this approach is that embedded teams don't have strategic scope. For instance, they do not build or manage enterprise data warehouses. Therefore, embedded teams tend to have rather limited influence.