Why do business users need or want better self-service for analytics? Because they are the people closest to the business priorities and goals and are faced with the important and urgent decisions needed to achieve those goals. They are under constant pressure to analyze volumes of data and to find insights and answers. They need the capabilities to identify, explore, analyze, report, predict and share information. Effective self-service allows them to do that easily and quickly.
In the past, users in each of the functional business areas, for example, Sales, Marketing and Finance, simply went out and purchased their own analytical tools. In doing so, they often felt liberated from the constraints of running their needs through a central gatekeeper, such as IT.
