Managed Selfservice BI

It has been a while back since i wrote a blog and that’s because my daughter is born!! She is a healthly young girl. So sleepless nights, here I come!! Okay well let's go back to business.

At this moment I’m creating a presentation for managed Selfservice BI. A couple of months ago, i didn’t quite understand the concept of managed Selfservice BI. Why? Well because when I read the papers of Forrester and Gartner about agileBI, Managed BI Selfservice BI, etc information workers complain about information they can’t find or they had traditional BI questions. How do you solve that with managed Selfservice BI? If you'can't find the information a tool won't find it for you.

So what is Managed Selfservice BI about? Well in my opinion it’s not a tool but a complete concept. A concept of the following parts:
• An Enterprise BI Environment
• A non official circuit
• Validated and non validated sources
• Information workers
• Governance committee

So this is happening: Information workers will get information from validated sources. This is the information that they can count on that it is correct. It is validated by a special committee, a governance committee (powerusers, IT) which approve non official information (reports, data, etc). This non official information is like a grey circuit. Information comes from all kind of sources like internet, email, partners or what ever. When the governance committee approves a source the data is integrated in the enterprise BI environment. A set of acceptance criteria will be needed to make a clear vision of what is accepted and what not.

The information that the power users created during their work will be monitored. A risk analysis will be done whether the information is critical, or it needs scalability or it needs to be standardized, etc. When certain risks are too high, it needs to be integrated in the BI environment.

So still reading a lot about selfservice BI and more information can be expected in the future..

Hennie