Self-Service BI, or self-service Business Intelligence represents a new idea of data management in which users can act independently.
Modern data analysis tools are increasingly geared toward introducing capabilities of self-service, that is, they want to offer access to data to all business users and not just analysts, thus breaking down the barriers of using advanced tools and enabling communication between expert and business users. From this desire comes the concept of self-service Business Intelligence (or self-service BI), i.e., analysis tools that allow the end user to obtain information independently and in an easy, fast, intuitive way.
With traditional data analysis tools, in fact, users who want to learn more about the data and satiate some curiosity have to send a request to the IT expert or analyst and wait for answers. This is a slow process, and many times the information of interest arrives too late, when managers have already opted for suboptimal or incorrect decisions.
Companies that want to build a data-driven culture, or become data-driven for all intents and purposes, must simplify access to data and make user-friendly analytics applications available.
Self-service BI helps business users explore data, create reports and dashboards without the support of analysts or data scientists.
Qlik Insight Advisor to generate charts with natural language
To strengthen self-service BI techniques, modern data analysis technologies propose new visualization capabilities, interactive tools, and innovative techniques based on artificial intelligence and machine learning.
One such tool is theInsight Advisor from Qlik Sense ( Qlik‘s Business Intelligence platform), which guides users in creating views and exploring information by leveraging natural language processing and understanding (Natural Language Processing).
Conversation-based systems are increasingly used in customer services, and their success is due to the simplicity of interaction: in fact, the user can express his or her intentions in words.
The Insight Advisor system looks like a simple search bar, where the user can type in or voice a piece of information of interest, such as Show sales by customer.
Users get a number of new interactive charts that can be edited and added directly to dashboards to perform further exploration.
The Insight Advisor provides an entry point for exploring data and creating visualizations; in fact, visualizations are based on the dimensions and measurements in the Qlik Sense application, as well as what the system learns from using the data in the charts.
There is also a layer for defining business logic that enables personalization of information generation, and machine learning ensures that suggestions are increasingly intelligent and relevant over time.
A self-service business intelligence software simple and powerful
The Insight Advisors in the Qlik Sense business intelligence platform are a great way to distribute information to all users quickly and easily. It is not just a question-and-answer system: the user is also guided through a data exploration experience. In fact, the system understands the user’s needs and proposes contexts that allow the user to analyze and reveal hidden information (insights).
In more modern businesses where data are critical to supporting decision making, the lack of expertise in data preparation and presentation operations does not allow people who are in charge of business processes to conduct analysis on their own.
A combination of data science and artificial intelligence makes analytics accessible to more people to get value from data, enabling them to ask questions and automatically generate insights in an easy and conversational way.
Contact us to find out how to make your company’s data analytics easier and more accessible and make fast, data-driven decisions.
