Should Organizations Empower Business Teams with Self-Service Analytics?

The paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the potential benefits and risks of enabling business teams to conduct decentralized self-service analytics. It concludes that while empowering business users with analytics capabilities can provide faster insights and greater autonomy, a lack of governance can lead to inaccurate analysis and security issues. The paper recommends a balanced approach of phased adoption tied to analytics maturity assessments, strong data governance, positioning IT as an enabling partner, and instilling an enterprise-wide data-driven culture. It highlights that realizing the promise of self-service analytics requires developing analytical capabilities across business and IT, securing executive sponsorship and nurturing partnerships through cross-functional governance and collaboration. With concerted effort across people, process, technology, and culture dimensions, organizations can unlock significant upside from self-service analytics while mitigating risks.