Not too simple, not too complex, but just right

Albert Einstein said insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. This throws an interesting light on the past 15 year’s obsession within Business Intelligence circles for end-user, self-service BI in all its guises: ad-hoc query, data discovery, faceted data search and so on. To find out why, watch this short video below or scroll down to read the article.

Time and time again this “let’s get the users to do more work for themselves approach” has proved ineffective. Although vital for the minority of analysts in an organization, these tools never cut it, when it comes to delivering for end-users. However slick generic analysis interfaces become, the need for training on them undermines their usefulness to end-users. If you want a lesson from consumer IT, just look at the number of training courses available for Google, Facebook, Twitter and just about every iPad app, in every case the answer is the same: ZERO.

Generic ad-hoc/self-service is pretty much always implemented as a knee jerk reaction to the “reporting backlog” issue. When the IT or BI team can’t keep up with requests for information from the end-users, getting users to do more for themselves seems like a good idea, but, unfortunately, the pendulum swings all the way to “get the users to do EVERYTHING for themselves” and the tools that support this are ALWAYS too complex to be used without some level of training.

This is where things break down.

Even if end-users find time to go on a training course for a generic ad-hoc/self-service BI tool, when they get back to the office, the problems that have stacked up on their desk are not data related. So, by the time they have caught up with their workload and get around to revisiting the tool they learnt, they can’t remember what to do.

There is another way, which could be called Goldilocks BI – not too simple (like canned reports), not too complex (like ad-hoc/self-service BI tools), but just right … providing end-users with all of the information they need to do their jobs through a no-training required interface offering just the right level of interactivity so they can quickly answer their business questions.

This type of BI is better described as “tailored BI” and the ideal delivery mechanism is interactive dashboards which are built to particular requirements and provide enough interactivity to give end-users the level of detail they need but in an intuitive interface, tailored to the task at hand, so end-users find these dashboards intuitive to use (with no training required).

This balance between allowing the users to do what they need without asking then to do too much will have a dramatic impact on user adoption of BI in the coming months and years, and if we get the balance right we can genuinely look forward to a future of 100% adoption and Universal BI.

So, if you are planning to roll out BI which will require end-user training, STOP and think about what you are doing. With interactive dashboards there is no training, just empowered users across a data-driven organization.

Making the leap to 100% BI adoption

In the near future, Universal BI will see us make the leap from 20% to 100% BI adoption and in the process make our organizations truly data driven. One of the reasons we can be so certain of this, is thanks to the wildfire growth of the iPad and other tablet devices. To find out why, watch this short video below or scroll down to read the article.

Interestingly, whilst the iPad’s delightful fusion of software and hardware might account for its initial success, its wildfire growth stands squarely on the shoulders of the apps which it allows people to run. It is the apps which keep people coming back to their iPads time after time … because of their incredible usefulness, their convenience, and their simplicity.

It is not hard to imagine a future where pretty much everyone has a tablet device close to them at all times and for it to become the primary place they go to for information, at least in their personal lives.

Interestingly, in the transition to the business world, this is one of the few areas where the concept of “IT Consumerization” makes complete sense. These same consumer apps are silently setting the bar for information delivery inside our organizations as well.

Whilst end-users may not be clamoring for BI to be delivered on their iPad’s today, it is pretty much certain that if you make great Business Intelligence content available on tablet devices, people will use it for the same three reasons: usefulness, convenience and simplicity.

So what makes great BI content on a tablet? Well we are already much closer this than you might think. Because dashboards, in particular interactive dashboards, are a near-perfect template for BI delivery on tablet devices and so the evolution of BI over the past few years, through the rise of interactive dashboards, is already paving a way to this future. Even better, these dashboards can also be deployed on the desktop where most users still spend most of their time today.

Some things are just obvious and BI in the form of interactive dashboards in an iPad-style app is one of them. When you think about it, it is hard to imagine needing anything else to supply your end-user information requirements. It is also hard to imagine end-users not using interactive dashboards if they were available on their tablet device, which is why we can now realistically start looking towards 100% BI adoption and Universal BI

Imagine all the information end-users need from all sources – big data, medium-sized data and small data – accessible interactively, at their fingertips, in an iPad App. It is hard to imagine BI like this not being adopted like wildfire. This is a future which is closer than you might think and today’s deployments of interactive dashboards provide us with a path to take …from the desktop, to the tablet, and on to Universal BI.