Howard Dresner, founder and Chief Research Officer at Dresner Advisory Services is one of the top business intelligence experts. Dresner’s 2023 Self-Service Business Intelligence Market Study dives into how self-service BI is changing how businesses run—and how people work.  

It’s a thought-provoking topic we explore in a conversation between Howard and Domo leaders Ben Schein and Chris Wright. They share helpful insights from the study, which is packed with enough stats to warm any data nerd’s heart and shed light on the future of collaborative analytics. Here are three of our favorite takeaways. Make sure to tune into the full webinar to see how companies are using self-service BI to make smart decisions that lead to great results. 

 

1—To put data to work for everyone, let people self-serve. 

The only way to get data where it needs to go is to enable self-service analytics throughout your company. “We want to achieve 100% penetration of business intelligence in the organization,” said Schein. “And this is one of the tools that we have to do that to get insights into the hands of all users.” Dresner’s data backs this up. “This notion of end-user self-service is right at #11 [of 59 technologies and initiatives strategic to business intelligence in 2023),” he says—so that’s pretty high on the priority list.  

The key to creating a data-driven culture? Democratize access to data so you can put it to work for everyone—one of the best ways to do this is letting people self-serve.  

 

2—Context matters—and collaboration can’t happen without it.   

“If you’re engaging in this whole notion of data-driven insights, you want to collaborate within the BI tool because it stays in context,” says Schein. “Everybody knows what you’re talking about, and I think it’s a much better way of not only collaborating, but also doing group decision-making.”

And when it comes to the tool functionality people expect from their collaborative BI environment, Dresner says, “The most important ones are ‘help me find stuff’ and ‘help me share stuff.’ And what we’ve been seeing over a number of years is finding stuff is really hard for organizations.” 

 

3—Beyond human collaboration: technical systems collaboration matters too.  

Putting data to work for everyone requires more than just human collaboration—it requires technical system collaboration too—like connecting your BI platform to a messaging tool or integrating data tools with monitoring systems and real-time data feeds. This emerging trend in business analytics complements human collaboration and clarifies the importance of seamless integration between collaborative frameworks and business intelligence tools. 

App Studio, which will be available in limited beta in the Fall of 2023, is a good example of technology integration that honors how people want to experience data. “It provides a toolset where you can really package a lot of different content together, that before would live in multiple different places,” says Wright. “Before it would be a dashboard over here, some cards over here, some data sets over here.” With App Studio, people can package everything in one place and share information in context wherever they need it.   

For more insights on self-service BI trends and the role of self-service analytics in empowering everyone across an organization to make an impact, check out the full webinar.