Is Self Service Analytics The Key To True Data Democratization?

data democratization is a craze that’s not going away any time soon. More and more companies are trying to give their employees access to data to help them improve job performance and overall company health, but with this has come specific challenges.

One of these has been simply that with the hunger for data from all areas of the company, trying to keep up with this demand has become a real struggle for data teams, especially when understanding of data throughout the company demands more complex analysis. This has created a conundrum for many companies - they want to give each employee the chance to be data-driven, but they lack the resources to deliver.

One of the big developments we have seen to try and solve this problem has been the emergence of self service analytics. The idea behind this is that it allows everybody in the company to essentially become a data scientist, by making data available to whoever wants it, whenever they want it. This is most commonly done through dashboarding, which can show real-time data, but in some cases can also be fully implemented analysis tools.

It is big business too, with companies like Qlik having seen over $700 million in sales. They now sit at number 10 on the Forbes Innovative Growth Companies List. The key to their success has been in making the complicated simple. Their CEO Lars Björk pointed out the pride the company had in this fact during an interview with Forbes, ‘I think we can take pride in the fact that we were the ones that introduced the whole notion of (BI) self-service and making this something very easy to use. So simple my mother can use it.