New Report Shows High Interest, Low Adoption of Self-Service Analytics

A new report shows interest in self-service analytics tools is running high among businesses, but that hasn’t translated to higher adoption.

Logi Analytics on Tuesday released the findings of its second annual State of Self-Service Business Intelligence (BI) report. It focuses on how business users and IT professionals view and use self-service business intelligence (BI) tools.

The report is based on an online survey of more than 800 business and technology professionals in August and September. Respondents included executives, directors and staff from line of business and IT at companies of all sizes.

The report shows that 91 percent of IT and business users agree self-service analytics tools are essential, while only 22 percent reported they have access to and use the tools when they need it, the “same disappointing percentage reported in 2014.”

Alvin Wong, lead author and Logi Analytics’ product marketing manager, tells Channel Partners the report points to a “huge opportunity” for the channel.

“Because self service is in such high demand and adoption is still so low, we found that 95 percent of IT organizations plan to invest in self-service BI tools in the next two years,” he said. “We also find that the data landscape is rapidly evolving as users want to analyze data coming from an increasingly wide range of sources, including application data not housed by IT as well as big-data sources, so this shift presents an opportunity.”

Compared to 2014, businesses aren’t interested in just investing in enhancing existing tools or implementing new ones, Wong said. The top area for investment is end-user training, he said.

“This should inform the channel that customer success when it comes to self-service is more than just selling/buying a product,” he said. “Addressing gaps in user adoption and user skill set require providing training on the tools as well as how to work with data so users can become more self-sufficient.”

The biggest driver for self-service analytics remains the flexibility it gives business users to get things done on their own time, according to the report. In 2015, self-service BI reduced IT requests by 47 percent, up from 37 percent in 2014.

Some 63 percent of business users in marketing said self-service BI is “very important” to their job, the highest of all departments; however, only 9 percent of marketing respondents were very satisfied, the lowest of all departments. The gap in satisfaction highlights how a typical business user community struggles with transforming into a data-driven organization, according to the report.

This year, 43 percent of business users said they had access to all the data and information they needed without asking IT, down from 51 percent in 2014. This suggests the need for more data coming from more sources, and the complexity of pulling it all together, have made business users more reliant on IT for their self-service needs.