CHECKLIST REPORT

2017

Six Strategies for

Accelerating ROI from
Self-Service BI and Visual Analytics

By David Stodder

Sponsored by:
 MARCH 2017

TDWI CHECKLIST REPORT TABLE OF CONTENTS

Six Strategies for Accelerating

ROI from Self-Service BI and 2 FOREWORD
Visual Analytics 3 NUMBER ONE
Find technology that drives higher user productivity
with data
By David Stodder
4 NUMBER TWO
Cover the full spectrum of analytics with a flexible,
integrated platform

5 NUMBER THREE
Shorten data preparation time to fit dynamic
self-service requirements

6 NUMBER FOUR
Implement effective governance and stewardship
through joint business/IT leadership

7 NUMBER FIVE
Accelerate ROI by using flexible cloud and hybrid
deployment models

8 NUMBER SIX
Drive exponential growth in business insights with
self-service data discovery

9 FINAL WORD

9 ABOUT OUR SPONSOR

10 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

10 ABOUT TDWI RESEARCH

10 ABOUT TDWI CHECKLIST REPORTS

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TDWI CHECKLIST REPORT: SIX S TR ATEGIES FOR ACCELER ATING ROI

FOREWORD

Organizations can unleash the untapped potential of business intelligence (BI) and analytics by
empowering users with greater freedom and flexibility in how they work with data. Historically,
enterprise BI users have been dependent on IT to provide access to data and the capabilities to
interact with and analyze it. To do it themselves, most users have had to resort to spreadsheets and
desktop databases. If they had access to more powerful tools, they have had to depend on isolated
power users in their business functions who had the technical savvy to write queries, pull data, and
set up reports for them.
Now, self-service BI and analytics products have matured to give users better capabilities for
personalizing how they interact with data, perform analytics, and share their insights through
visualizations. Initially brought into organizations by users in business functions, the products are
riding a strong wave of interest in self-service orientation. In every one of its recent surveys about
BI and analytics trends, TDWI has found that a strong majority of research participants believe
that it is strategically important for their organizations to increase self-service capabilities. They
want to expand the role of data and analytics in decision making across their enterprises, from top
management to frontline personnel. They are looking to increase the impact of data insights for both
daily decisions and groundbreaking business innovation.
How can organizations realize stronger and faster return on investment (ROI) from self-service BI
and analytics? That is the focus of this TDWI Checklist. It is critical for organizations to improve
ROI because they are devoting significant portions of their budget to BI and analytics products and
the data architecture and infrastructure to support them. It is also important because they have a
strong, competitive need for what BI and analytics can provide.
This TDWI Checklist covers six strategic issues to address to realize higher ROI with BI and
analytics. In some cases, our recommendations focus on traditionally enterprise-level concerns, such
as governance. In others, we look at overcoming challenges to enable more users to meet dynamic
business demands.

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NUMBER ONE
FIND TECHNOLOGY THAT DRIVES HIGHER USER
PRODUCTIVITY WITH DATA
Boosting the productivity of knowledge workers is critical. BI and analytics can contribute
significantly to this objective by enabling executives, managers, and frontline personnel to use data
and analytics effectively to align their performance and decision making with company objectives.
By having access to the right analytics at the right time, with the right means to explore and discover
insights, knowledge workers can focus on what needs to be done. They can use analytics to move
beyond guessing based on undisciplined consumption of data.
Knowledge workers are more productive if they can make data-driven decisions with confidence and Confident
accuracy. The current wave of self-service-oriented BI and analytics technologies help knowledge
workers reach a level of confidence with less dependence on technical specialists in IT. However, and accurate
organizations need to keep moving forward with technology and improve the maturity of their decisions drive
practices if they are to overcome challenges that arise as users aim for more ambitious goals.
productivity
Here are two considerations regarding how to apply self-service oriented BI and analytics
technologies and practices for improving user productivity.
for knowledge
workers.
Help users do more than just visualize data.
Although not all users need or want to develop their own analytics, our research finds that most are
interested in greater data interaction. Therefore, even users who say they prefer to simply consume
data should have the ability to interactively search and explore it. This way, they will not be limited to
static reports and visualizations produced for them by IT specialists or power-user analysts.

Integrate BI and analytics with business decision processes.

Users will be more productive with BI and analytics if they have actionable information and can
readily apply insights. Access to the most recent data is critical to many decision processes; thus,
organizations should make sure BI and analytics products and their existing data architecture and
infrastructure can support the level of data freshness required.

For some, the best way to integrate BI and analytics with decision processes is by embedding
functionality into their most commonly used business applications. Users can analyze and visualize
data within a familiar system; they do not have to change gears to use a separate standalone BI or
visual analytics system. Recent technologies are making it easier to integrate BI and analytics into
applications, portals, and Web-based services. Organizations should evaluate whether embedding
would make it easier and more productive for users to apply BI and analytics to their decisions.

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NUMBER TWO
COVER THE FULL SPECTRUM OF ANALYTICS WITH
A FLEXIBLE, INTEGRATED PLATFORM
IT-driven, “one size fits all” enterprise BI reporting cannot alone give users enough flexibility to
personalize how they access, analyze, and visualize data. Self-service-oriented BI and analytics are
prospering in organizations because they provide greater flexibility, particularly for ad hoc analysis.

However, unrestrained self-service data access and analysis can present problems. These include
multiple and inflexible data models and metadata layers that do not fit together, disparate data
silos, and redundant tools. In addition, organizations cannot provide effective training when there
is a multitude of tools and platforms. Users will end up training themselves, developing their own Users today are
workarounds, or just going back to using spreadsheets when they cannot figure out how to do what focusing more
they need to do with the newer technologies.
on performing
These problems have a negative impact on ROI. Many organizations are therefore looking for a happy analyses than
medium—that is, a way they can realize key benefits of an enterprise standard without reducing
users’ flexibility. To accomplish this, organizations that have an enterprise BI platform need to revise simply running
it so that it is more open and extensible. Those that do not have one or that have an outdated one reports.
should make it a priority to establish an integrated platform tailored for self-service-oriented BI and
analytics. The platform’s mission should be to support a spectrum of analytics and reporting styles
and use cases: from simple to advanced visual data exploration and analysis; from guided to custom
analytics; and from standalone to embedded analytics.

Whether they are extending their existing enterprise BI platform or creating a new integrated
platform, it is still important to meet the organization’s requirements for traditional, centrally
managed reporting and distribution. However, the emphasis needs to be adjusted. Unlike traditional
enterprise BI, such a platform must support users who are shifting from a reporting-centric approach
with some analysis to an analysis-centric approach with some reporting.

Here are two considerations for evaluating products to support an integrated platform for self-service-
oriented BI and analytics.

The platform’s underlying data model must be flexible.

Organizations should implement a data model that is flexible enough for users to analyze data
relationships and associations across sources, not just within a single data warehouse or data
repository. This is essential for users who need single, integrated views from diverse data sources, such
as those about customers. A flexible data model is critical to supporting a broad range of analytics use
cases, which will be the norm as self-service-oriented BI and analytics expand.

The integrated platform should be scalable and extensible.

Typically, users initiate self-service-oriented BI and analytics projects within their business function
or department. If the project is successful, users or the organization as a whole will want to promote
it so that other departments and functions can take advantage of it and apply it to their use cases.
Thus, the integrated platform should make strong use of technologies that improve scalability and
performance, including in-memory computing and parallel computing. In addition to the common,
flexible data model, the platform should also maintain a common data language, definitions, and
governance so that as projects are expanded they can take advantage of standards.

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NUMBER THREE
SHORTEN DATA PREPARATION TIME TO FIT DYNAMIC
SELF-SERVICE REQUIREMENTS
For many users, data preparation difficulties are what impede progress most in the quest to realize
higher ROI from BI and analytics. Data preparation covers a range of processes that begin with the
initial ingestion of data—from one or multiple sources—and move through improving its quality
and completeness, defining and standardizing it, enriching the data, and extracting, transforming,
and loading (ETL) it as necessary. As users adopt self-service BI and analytics tools, data preparation
becomes a more visible problem, often halting their progress. Users want the flexibility to interact
with diverse data in different ways. They don’t want to be limited by inflexible processes with long
lead times. Data scientists
TDWI Research finds that lost time and inefficiency due to data preparation are common problems
spend 80% of
across different-sized organizations. Though ETL processes for data warehouses and BI reporting may their time in
be stable, serving ad hoc, dynamic business needs requires much manual work because processes to data preparation,
combine, cleanse, and transform different types of data are hard to repeat or share.
leaving too little
In a research survey for the 2016 TDWI Best Practices Report: Improving Data Preparation for time for actual
Business Analytics, 45 percent of respondents said they spend over 60 percent of their time just
preparing the data. Anecdotally, we find that many data scientists spend 80 percent of their time in
data science
data preparation, leaving too little time for actual data science and analytics. and analytics.

EFFECTIVE ANALYTICS DEPENDS ON EFFICIENT DATA PREP

Organizations should evaluate the current state of their data preparation and develop a strategy
for improvement. Integrating data from different sources without leaving relevant data behind
or producing errors due to redundancy is a difficult part of data preparation, yet it is essential for
understanding and improving the data’s consistency, completeness, and quality. The accuracy of
downstream analytics depends on these steps.

Self-service data preparation technology is evolving rapidly, whether provided inside self-service BI
and analytics products or as standalone tools. Users can employ the technology to streamline data
preparation so that the data is complete, relevant, and of the highest possible quality. If the data falls
short, self-service users will need products that offer profiling routines that alert them of the status
of the data they are working with and recommend how to improve it. Upgrading data preparation
technology and processes will enable diverse users to get faster access to data and realize ROI sooner
by being able to analyze situations and make decisions more quickly.

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NUMBER FOUR
IMPLEMENT EFFECTIVE GOVERNANCE AND STEWARDSHIP
THROUGH JOINT BUSINESS AND IT LEADERSHIP
Organizations can realize value from BI and analytics faster if users are confident in their data and
understand the rules by which it may be used and shared. Governance is therefore critical to ROI
because it is about defining and applying rules and policies for protecting sensitive data and guiding
users so they analyze and share data in ways that meet an organization’s standards. Governance
plans set out who is responsible for the data as well as for the byproducts of analysis, including
visualizations (e.g., dashboards), measures, formulas, and analytics models.

Understandably, in the excitement to do more on their own through self-service BI and analytics, Leaders must
some users will initially see governance as a nuisance and an effort by centralized IT to reassert power.
However, most users come to understand the importance of governance rules and policies because
stress the
these rules ensure that they are working with a single source of truth. They are able to move projects importance of
along faster with fewer errors and spend less time worrying about the data’s provenance. governance in
To ensure support, business and IT leadership should drive governance and data stewardship jointly. avoiding waste
Data stewardship complements governance by improving data quality and providing users with and errors.
guidance about data sources as they develop their own artifacts, such as dashboards, visualizations,
and analytics models. A key part of stewardship is furthering the development of common data
definitions and metadata repositories, which help users access complete and relevant data about
subjects of interest. Together, stewardship and governance help build and sustain the value of BI and
analytics projects so that they generate higher ROI.

IMPLEMENTING GOVERNANCE AND STEWARDSHIP

Bring in specialists or assign the responsibilities to business stakeholders and IT
personnel. Whoever is chosen will oversee how users share and collaborate on data as well as
guide users’ development of artifacts such as visualizations, analytical models, and reports. They can
encourage users to exchange insights about the quality and relevance of data sources for particular BI
and analytics projects.

Have data stewards help users avoid redundant efforts. This can be done by monitoring
whether data preparation routines or analytics artifacts already exist and by leading efforts to create
common libraries of visualizations and analytics models.

Choose BI and analytics products that support governance in a self-service environment.

Products should facilitate the creation of shared, centralized, and approved libraries of dimensions,
measures, visualizations, and other artifacts. Rather than limit users to a single source, products must
enable users to integrate their own data or data from Web-based sources with the governed corporate
data sources for analysis. Look for products that provide a platform for managing data security based
on user entitlements, an approach that fits well with governance in a self-service environment.

Ensure that governance is not unnecessarily restrictive. If rules and policies are too tight,
users may skirt them by using ungoverned, “shadow” systems. Business and IT leaders need to stress
the value of governance and stewardship in avoiding wasted time and errors due to inconsistent
and incomplete data, and problems caused by use of data in ways that expose the organization to
regulatory punishment.

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NUMBER FIVE
ACCELERATE ROI BY USING FLEXIBLE CLOUD AND
HYBRID DEPLOYMENT OPTIONS
It is no longer the case that the only way to implement BI and analytics is to install standalone
systems on premises. Today, cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS) are serious alternatives.
In the survey for the 2016 TDWI Research Best Practices Report: BI, Analytics, and the Cloud,
just over half of respondents said they currently use a cloud deployment model for analytics and
31 percent were planning to within a few years. Organizations should evaluate cloud and SaaS
options for BI and analytics and should develop a data architecture strategy that integrates these new
platforms with existing on-premises systems.
Self-service BI
Cloud and SaaS can help organizations realize ROI sooner by enabling them to skip long processes
for acquiring software and hardware and having IT configure and deploy complete systems on
and visual data
premises. Cloud and SaaS reduce total cost of ownership as well because IT does not have to maintain discovery are
and upgrade the systems. Organizations instead focus on allocating appropriate network bandwidth top objectives
to handle user access to SaaS and cloud-based products and ensuring (through contracts and policies)
that security, availability, performance, and portability requirements are met.
for cloud and
SaaS adoption.
TDWI research finds that self-service BI and visual data discovery are at the top of the list of
most organizations’ objectives for cloud and SaaS deployment. Cloud and SaaS options enable
organizations to respond to immediate business needs by spinning up cloud-based BI and
analytics, which in most cases they can then spin down when services are no longer needed. For
small-to-medium-sized businesses, cloud and SaaS options help level the playing field with larger
competitors by making it more affordable and less complicated to add computing power to BI and
analytics projects.

MERGE CLOUD AND ON-PREMISES WITH HYBRID ARCHITECTURES

Organizations that invested in existing on-premises BI and data warehousing systems need to build
a strategy for hybrid architectures. These describe a single, coherent environment that includes cloud
and on-premises systems. The goal is to have users view data sets composed of both cloud-based and
on-premises data sources through a single log-in. This means that organizations should ensure that
their data preparation and integration technologies allow administrators to extract and upload data
from diverse sources and run ETL routines as needed.

You should also examine security policies to ensure that they spell out how security will be handled
across the different cloud service providers and on-premises systems. Policies should detail whether
access will be available externally as well as internally and from what types of devices (with respect to
mobile users).

Organizations should ensure that the data model is accessible and effective across whole of the hybrid
architecture. This model is critical for users to gain a single view of information, even if it is based on
multiple cloud-based and on-premises sources. A shared metadata repository or business glossary can
also help users find all relevant data in the hybrid architecture. With these capabilities, organizations
can build a knowledge base about how the data is interconnected and how it is processed and stored
within the hybrid system.

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NUMBER SIX
DRIVE EXPONENTIAL GROWTH IN BUSINESS INSIGHTS
WITH SELF-SERVICE DATA DISCOVERY
One of the most powerful aspects of self-service-oriented BI and analytics is that even casual users
are able to perform their own data exploration and discovery. Previously, users had been confined to
predefined, hierarchical paths of analysis through extracted subsets of data. For ad hoc analysis, the
only alternative was to wait for IT data analysts or expert power users to write queries to bring back
data sets for exploration, which they would then explore on personal spreadsheets.

Today, leading self-service-oriented BI and analytics products offer rich, interactive data visualizations
to make discovery easier. With some products, users can build and modify visualizations themselves Effective data
with a drag-and-drop interface and a library of objects such as charts and heat maps. They can also discovery and
use visualizations as they apply advanced statistical or other analytics techniques to the data.
exploration
However, data discovery and exploration require more than data visualization. Users must be able require more
to examine data and discover associations by making interactive selections and searching data sets.
Products that are based on an associative model let users engage in freeform exploration of how data than just
values are linked and related across sources. Such products allow users to integrate visualizations with visualization.
discovery so that as they change the context of their discovery, they can observe the changes in their
analytics. Some also integrate search functionality so users can explore data and reports through
natural-language queries.

EXPLORATION AND DISCOVERY ARE PRIORITIES FOR BI AND ANALYTICS

Data exploration and discovery are vital to realizing ROI from BI and analytics, as these are where
users uncover unexpected and sometimes game-changing insights that they can apply to business
issues. Therefore, organizations should place a higher priority on meeting user requirements for more
frequent and timely self-service data discovery and exploration. For example, in many organizations
discovery is done on a batch schedule, sometimes overnight or over several days, based on when
computing time is available. Organizations should evaluate products and their data architectures to
gauge how well they can support more frequent discovery, including against near real-time data.

Organizations are often reluctant to expose production systems—including data warehouses and
operational data stores—to data discovery and exploration out of concern for overall performance.
Here, cloud computing can be helpful. Organizations can spin up sandboxes or even data lakes into
which IT can load relevant data—or users can supply data from external, Web-based sources. Users
can then access these cloud-based sources for exploratory analysis and discovery rather than the
production systems themselves. Organizations can update the data in these resources at a frequency
that suits the type of discovery and business context. In research surveys, TDWI has found that
cloud-based sandboxes and data lakes are becoming popular places for users to try new analytics
tools, including those drawn from open source projects.

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FINAL WORD

BI and analytics products and their supporting data architecture comprise a critical and often-
growing investment. Organizations are under pressure to demonstrate ROI from all of their
technology investments, but many place a special priority on ROI from BI and analytics because of
their potential to enable the organization to dramatically improve management and effectiveness
across operations and processes. The core value of BI and analytics is drawn from how well products
and systems support innovative, data-driven decisions. Fortunately, products are evolving rapidly
to enable different types of users to accomplish more on their own within sensible governance
guidelines to assure relevant, high-quality analytics insights.
This checklist has described six steps for improving ROI from BI and analytics. Attention to these
steps will help your organization advance faster in realizing value and empowering users to get the
most out of BI and analytics in their decision making.

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ABOUT OUR SPONSOR

www.qlik.com
Qlik delivers intuitive platform solutions for self-service data visualization, guided analytics
applications, embedded analytics, and reporting to approximately 40,000 customers worldwide.
Companies of all sizes, across all industries and geographies, use Qlik solutions to visualize and
explore information, generate insight and make better decisions. At Qlik, we optimize business
intelligence (BI) by harnessing the collective intelligence of people across an organization. We focus
on empowering people—by enabling everyone in an organization to see the whole story that lives
within their data.

ABOUT OUR AUTHOR

David Stodder is senior director of TDWI Research for business intelligence.
He focuses on providing research-based insights and best practices for
organizations implementing BI, analytics, data discovery, data visualization,
performance management, and related technologies and methods and has been a
thought leader in the field for over two decades. Previously, he headed up his own
independent firm and served as vice president and research director with Ventana
Research. He was the founding chief editor of Intelligent Enterprise where he also served as editorial
director for nine years. You can reach him by email (dstodder@tdwi.org), on Twitter (@dbstodder),
and on LinkedIn (linkedin.com/in/davidstodder).

ABOUT TDWI RESEARCH

TDWI Research provides research and advice for BI professionals worldwide. TDWI Research
focuses exclusively on analytics and data management issues and teams up with industry
practitioners to deliver both broad and deep understanding of the business and technical issues
surrounding the deployment of business intelligence and data management solutions. TDWI
Research offers reports, commentary, and inquiry services via a worldwide membership program
and provides custom research, benchmarking, and strategic planning services to user and vendor
organizations.

ABOUT TDWI CHECKLIST REPORTS

TDWI Checklist Reports provide an overview of success factors for a specific project in business
intelligence, data warehousing, or a related data management discipline. Companies may use this
overview to get organized before beginning a project or to identify goals and areas of improvement
for current projects.

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