Heard on Reddit: "Self-Service B.I. - does it really work?"

In a word, no. But why?

Our friends on Reddit's r/businessintelligence forum tackled that question, and here's what they came up with.

Why? I believe this has to do with the fact that the overwhelming majority of users are not trained to use the tools the BI industry pushes for self-service (e.g. Power BI or Tableau) nor do they have much time or interest to learn how to use these tools - and they are not intuitive to use. 

95% of the time, business users will come back to the BI analyst to ask them to develop a new dashboard. Business users are rarely savvy enough to use tools like Power BI or Tableau or whatever, much less write custom queries against a data warehouse.

If PBI let you use service hosted data sets, including measures, and then had a simple visual front end that end users could use to play with visuals - then sure

Self service tools can’t really allow users to go into unchartered territory, which is where the real insights live :)

IMO the problem is just data literacy and culture in organisations. Self service BI solutions tend to be treated as projects delivered by a BI team to the organisation, but if that organisation hasn't got data literate people who want to engage with the tools, 

Want to do something a bit more complicated in Power BI? Better hope you can figure out DAX... Does that sound reasonable for the AP accountant who just wants a summary of spend by vendor, purchase part category for this year to date vs last year and budget?

Some of these people asking for the data already have enough to worry about. Asking them to start playing around in a cube is not ideal for them. They want instant gratification without doing any work. Again, I don't blame them.

What do you think?