Implementation Challenges of Self Service Business Intelligence: A Literature Review

Abstract

In a traditional Business Intelligence (BI) system, power users serve less experienced casual users. Power users analyze and gather data requested by casual users, and produce the reports and visualizations that casual users base their decisions on. When data volumes and the usage frequency of a traditional BI system increase, power users have problems serving all the requests from casual users. The Self Service Business Intelligence (SSBI) approach can enable users to be more self-reliant and less dependent on power users. Although SSBI promises more benefits compared to a traditional BI system, many organizations fail to implement SSBI. The literature review presented in this paper discusses six SSBI challenges related to "Access and use of data" and four challenges related to "Self-reliant users". Awareness of these ten challenges can help practitioners avoid common pitfalls, when implementing SSBI, as well as guide SSBI researchers in focusing on their future research efforts.

User Related Challenges of Self-Service Business Intelligence

“…Our 22 challenges in three categories do partly match and confirm the 4 user related SSBI challenges revealed in recent literature studies [6] and commonly listed in BI handbooks [12,13], but are here described on a much more detailed level.…”

“…Even though SSBI offers benefits compared to traditional BI, there are many challenges to address in order to make SSBI work [6,7], while there are few studies discussing SSBI challenges in depth. There is a lot of research on challenges for traditional BI implementation [8,9], but it is presumable that challenges for SSBI at least partly differ from traditional BI challenges.…”

“…[5]. However, implementing SSBI is not as easy as expected even though it offers many benefits [2,6].…”

“…State of the art SSBI reports which mention associated challenges when implementing and using SSBI are briefly mentioned [12,13]. Lennerholt, et al [6] have done an extensive literature review to identify known challenges associated to the implementation of SSBI. The results include six challenges related to "Access and use of Data" and four challenges to "A self-reliant user".…”

“…The user related challenges were: 1) Make SSBI tools easy to use; 2) Make SSBI results easy to consume and enhance; 3) Give the right tools to the user; and 4) Educate user in how to select, interpret and analyse data for decision-making. Several studies [6,12,13] indicate on a general level how realising SSBI is not as easy as suggested, but more in depth research is needed to in detail understand what those challenges implicate.…”