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INDUSTRY NEWS


19 May 2008

Successful self-service BI 'a myth'


In order for self-service business intelligence (BI) implementations to be successful, companies must use them in conjunction with existing, tailored BI solutions, it has been claimed.

Speaking at The Data Warehousing Institute's (TDWI) World Conference recently, Wayne Eckerson, director of research at the company, said that most self-service BI tools are unsuited for non-technically orientated staff, destinationCRM.com reports.

According to the website, he asked those in attendance: "We know in life that too much of a good thing can make you sick. Are we eager to embrace self-service BI because it truly meets the need of our user community or because it offloads the unwanted work of creating custom reports?"

Mr Eckerson also explained that reports and queries created by typical enterprises take up a lot of storage space, and that self-service BI can only ever provide a short term solution to any storage issues.

He added that it would not be enough to replace the need for large-scale corrective measures such as deleting reports that are no longer required.

Recently, research from Forrester indicated that BI is one of the quickest growing areas of the global enterprise software market.

It also identified web 2.0 technology as an increasing area of interest, forecasting that organisations will spend $6.4 billion (£3.3 billion) on blogs, wikis and other such tools in the next five years.

© 2006 Adfero Ltd.

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