Self-Service Analysis Description and Key Characteristics The best analysts, and often the best assets, in most organizations are those users who love to dig into the data and really understand why the business is performing the way it is. Whether they are doing a financial modeling exercise to predict future revenue or drilling into sales data to understand why a store in the Southeast is outperforming all the other stores, these users are performing service analysis in Excel. This self-service analysis (reports, graphs, dashboards, and so forth) created by business users without reliance on IT is the “Self Service Analysis” style of BI. Some common characteristics of this style are: Users are very familiar with the business data and have strong Excel skills. Users want to easily drill down, pivot, filter, and format the data. Users are often integrating information from a variety of sources. Users are usually working with small-to-medium sized data sets. have minimal specialized technical skills such as SQL, MDX, or other query languages. Although the analysis might be shared with others, distributing the information on a regular basis is not typically the primary purpose of this style. Tool Options Both Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel 2010 are excellent tools for supporting the Self Service Analysis style. Microsoft Excel is the most widely deployed BI tool in the world for the Self-Service Analysis style. Virtually all power users are familiar with Excel, and this is a comfortable environment for collecting and analyzing data, and for developing reports quickly. Excel allows great flexibility regarding the
Self-Service Analysis Description and Key Characteristics The best analysts, and often the best assets, in most organizations are those users who love to dig into the data and really understand why the business is performing the way it is. Whether they are doing a financial modeling exercise to predict future revenue or drilling into sales data to understand why a store in the Southeast is outperforming all the other stores, these users are performing analysis in Excel. This self-service analysis (reports, graphs, dashboards, and so forth) created by business users without reliance on IT is the “Self Service Analysis” style of BI. Some common characteristics of this style are: Users are very familiar with the business data and have strong Excel skills. Users want to easily drill down, pivot, filter, and format the data. Users are often integrating information from a variety of sources. Users are usually working with small-to-medium sized data sets. have minimal specialized technical skills such as SQL, MDX, or other query languages. Although the analysis might be shared with others, distributing the information on a regular basis is not typically the primary purpose of this style. Tool Options Both Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel 2010 are excellent tools for supporting the Self Service Analysis style. Microsoft Excel is the most widely deployed BI tool in the world for the Self-Service Analysis style. Virtually all power users are familiar with Excel, and this is a comfortable environment for collecting and analyzing data, and for developing reports quickly. Excel allows great flexibility regarding the service
Microsoft_BI_Tool_Choices.docx