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BI Self Service: Out of the Shadow and into the Limelight

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flashlight brightens the shadows A key issue that arises in nearly every business intelligence (BI) strategy assessment workshop I’ve conducted is “Shadow BI,” or decentralized and mostly unguided user development. Shadow BI is usually viewed by central BI teams as a negative, and for good cause—it’s uncontrolled development that often creates more data silos and data chaos, report proliferation, performance issues, and other ills.

But Shadow BI exists for a reason—users aren’t getting their needs met. Rather than fight Shadow BI, central IT organizations need to embrace, enable, and integrate it into their overall self-service BI strategy, and then leverages it for innovation and prototypes. The strategy should include defining self-service scope, development governance, data governance and data access, training and support, and other key considerations to protect users from themselves.

As today’s BI tools have become user friendly and users have become more analytics savvy, IT’s role is already shifting to one of more focus on data management, architecture, tools, and technologies, and less focus on development…

Embrace and Support Shadow BI

The following are a few ways for IT to get started embracing and supporting Shadow BI as part of BI self service:

  • BI Competency Centers: Engage Shadow BI as virtual or extended members of the BICC. Share development templates, processes and standards. Often, Shadow BI areas are candidates for BI and data governance participation as business analysts and data stewards or they’re a gateway to them.
  • Training and Education: Self-service tool use requires more than just tool training— business and design skills are also needed. Update your training programs to include these as well as tool training. Create an analytic “sandbox” where users can practice new skills and new tools.
  • Communities of Interest: Initiate and support informal internal communities around special interests such as visualization, predictive modeling, text mining, and so on. Extend them external communities like ASUG, user groups, and community networks. Provide a forum for super and super user “wannabes” to share and showcase their accomplishments.

Central BI partnering with Shadow BI areas is a win-win. Organizations can improve business alignment, governance, user satisfaction, and their overall BI and analytics success.

The post BI Self Service: Out of the Shadow and into the Limelight appeared first on The Decision Factor Blog.


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