Self serve BI

Access to data is a key driver of competitiveness for businesses. However, the limited resources of data departments often result in significant delays in processing requests, leading to frustration and inefficiency for business teams. Many companies adopt a self-service data approach, enabling business users, product owners, and executives to directly access relevant data through user-friendly tools.

In a self-service BI strategy, it is essential to add a semantic layer that is understandable to business teams. Data transformation tools like dbt or LookML (for Looker) help structure data into usable formats translated into business terms. This allows end users to manipulate and visualize data easily through solutions like Power BI, Looker, Metabase, or even Excel, without requiring advanced technical expertise.

Implementing a self-service strategy enhances the autonomy of business teams, enabling them to access data directly without relying on IT teams, thus accelerating decision-making processes. It also contributes to creating a centralized platform, facilitating data access across the entire organization. By strengthening internal data culture, this approach helps teams better understand, use, and analyze data in their daily operations.

However, the increase in tools and access points can lead to "data chaos," where multiple versions of the same business metric coexist, complicating analysis. To avoid these issues, it is crucial to establish a robust semantic layer, ensuring consistent and uniform data interpretation across all users.

MDN’s point of view

This is the dream of every data team. However, it requires impeccable data structuring, clear governance, transparency, and upskilling of business teams in data usage for decision-making. This topic is closely linked to the implementation of One Big Tables (OBTs), a semantic layer, and especially an easily exploitable gold layer.

Theodo’s point of view

At Theodo, we recommend implementing a self-service BI strategy for companies with a significant pool of users who can benefit from simplified data access. Self-service strategies improve business team efficiency, reduce the burden on IT teams, and enhance data literacy.