The Data Warehousing Institute

It is often said that successful BI is the art of bringing together people, processes, and technology. Yet many BI programs give the people dimension only a cursory glance, while giving most of their attention to the process and technology aspects. Such programs are likely to be troubled, and they will fail to achieve their full potential. These realities are certain, because people are the most essential element of BI.

A colleague at Seattle University expresses it this way: “Business intelligence doesn’t happen in BI tools. It happens between the ears of people, and in the conversations between those people.” Tools and processes help only to inspire the thinking and to facilitate the conversations.

BI culture is the environment in which people think, reason, and communicate about business truths and business decisions. Technology-focused programs frequently have a culture that is characterized by dysfunction, resistance, doubt, uncertainty, and fear. People-focused cultures have qualities of enthusiasm, belief, confidence, support, and competence. This keynote presentation contrasts the cultural extremes, describes the symptoms of troubled cultures, suggests methods to achieve cultural change, and offers the inspiration to put people first in your BI program.

Most BI professionals embrace the notion of “self-service BI” as a way to liberate end users from IT intermediaries and reporting backlogs. Self-service BI gives users direct access to data to create and format their own reports when and how they want. The only problem is that a majority of users don’t want this responsibility, and those who do usually create so many reports that performance, storage, and accessibility become serious issues. Today, savvy companies are balancing self-service BI with tailored delivery of reports to optimize user adoption. This presentation will examine the myth of self-service BI and ways to remedy it.

You Will Learn

• The technical differences between self service and tailored delivery
• The target audiences for self-service and tailored delivery
• How to manage tailored delivery environments so they remain responsive to changing user needs
• How to combine self-service and tailored delivery within a dashboard environment