Self-service BI catches on
December 13, 2010 No CommentsSOURCE: Computerworld
The Great Recession caught most of the used-car industry by surprise, says Chris Brady, CIO at Dealer Services Corp. A lot of dealers assumed the downturn would be short and mild, so they went on adding inventory at a fairly steady rate. As a result, many used-car inventory-financing firms didn’t see the writing on the wall until the recession was already in full swing.
Dealer Services, in contrast, got a heads up early in the year from its newly deployed business intelligence (BI) platform, Information Builders’ WebFocus, Brady says.
Dealer Services is far from alone. According to a recent Aberdeen Group report, 67% of “best in class” companies and 21% of all businesses have adopted some form of self-service BI.
Indeed, self-service BI looks to be the next big wave in business intelligence, industry experts agree. In a January 2010 report, Gartner, Inc. pointed to growing demand among business organizations for a “data discovery tool architecture” that not only provides end users with data and reports, but also enables them to navigate and visualize the data in a “surf and save” mode. This means that data views deemed valuable are stored for reuse or sharing.