Businesses around the world are using data extensively to make informed business decisions that assist them in tapping into unknown opportunities and avoiding uncertain threats. Data-driven businesses are ruling the world today and have a competitive edge over the incumbent businesses who are unable to leverage data for developing business strategies and taking business decisions. No business in the world downplays the significance of acquiring business intelligence through data however, not all of them can gain it. There are many barriers in acquiring business intelligence through data analytics which range from huge costs involved, technical expertise and programming skills required, presence of integrated data ecosystem, strong IT and MIS teams among many others. These barriers are the major reasons that businesses around the world are looking for self-service analytics so that they can stand on equal footing with those who have access to huge capital, strong IT teams, and good programming skills.  

Meaning of self-service analytics  

Self-service analytics as the name implies means data analytics that is possible by self without any intervention from IT and MIS teams. Anyone in the business can acquire any business information that he/she needs by conducting queries and gaining reports to infer the situation. Unlike traditional way of data analytics, self-service analytics does not require extreme IT and programming knowledge.  

Why self-service analytics?  

Over the years, self-service analytics has gained considerable momentum globally and there are many reasons for it, some of which are:  

Cost control: With self-service analytics, huge IT costs are saved. Businesses need not pay a considerable amount of money for IT support and IT staff as the process of acquiring business intelligence can be done by business users without the intervention of any IT expert. The saved cost helps businesses gain a cost advantage over the competitors and attain cost-leadership that assists in higher profitability.  

Data security: Self-service analytics helps businesses maintain data security by keeping the data within the organization away from third-party reach. Internal business users can make effective business judgments on their own without necessary interventions from third-party IT teams. A significant amount of data breaches occurs when data leaves the premises of the organization and self-service analytics helps avoid it.  

Quick decision-making: Self-service analytics enables businesses to take quick business decisions due to reduced interventions and dependencies. Any business user looking for a piece of information to make a decision can perform queries by themselves and extract the report without waiting for experts to do it. Incumbent businesses that take quick decisions are successful in avoiding threats timely and gaining the first-mover advantage.  

Bizintel360: Citizen data scientists first choice  

Bizintel360 is an AI-powered cloud-based platform for performing advanced analytics. It is an ideal tool for self-service analytics because it does not require any coding, programming, and/or technical knowledge to perform queries and extract reports. The in-built AI-driven search engine dashboard is extremely powerful and performs real-time data refresh which enables businesses to get real-time insights into key business areas. Citizen data scientists can easily identify root-cause problems in real-time without waiting for IT technicians to extract the picture out.  

Unlike other advanced analytics platforms, Bizintel360 comes with an in-built data lake that enables users to no longer depend on external data warehouses and pay for them over and above their analytics spend. To begin with, users need to define data sources and target locations. An integration bridge then has to be created by visual mapping of the data source and target to define the data flow. This can be done by anyone without any technical expertise or IT skills. Once the sources and targets are defined, an integration bridge created, real-time visualizations can be extracted that are highly interactive and customizable according to user needs.  

Bizintel360 helps perform self-service analytics on data from multiple sources and formats without any coding, programming, IT skills and/or technical expertise. All of this along with a simple UI make it the first choice of citizen data scientists.