Balance The Surge In Self-Service BI With “Goldilocks” Governance That’s Just Right

Enterprise leaders responsible for BI must recognize the importance of sourcing business data and making it available for self-service BI/analytics in today’s rapidly changing business and regulatory environment: Knowledge workers need insights via reporting and analytics at their fingertips. IT turnaround times often get in the way of faster delivery of BI and reporting. Forrester data shows that in 2019, 25% of global data and analytics decision makers said it took months to get analytics help from IT, while 8% said it took more than a year. As a result, end users are deploying self-service BI/analytics platforms where they can source new data and author new reports and dashboards with little to no help from IT: 41% of global data and analytics decision makers have already implemented self-service analytics platforms and another 25% are currently implementing them. But more self-service — turning business users into citizen developers and citizen data scientists — means revisiting how to govern these applications. Too much governance will send end users back to spreadsheets; too little will result in “data anarchy” with little hope of ever achieving single version of the truth. Forrester recommends the Goldilocks approach to BI governance: not too little, not too much, but just right. Read our upcoming update to this report and book an inquiry for help.