Implementation Challenges of Self Service Business Intelligence: A Literature Review

In a traditional Business Intelligence (BI) system, power users serve less experienced casual users. Power users analyze and gather data requested by casual users, and produce the reports and visualizations that casual users base their decisions on. When data volumes and the usage frequency of a traditional BI system increase, power users have problems serving all the requests from casual users. The Self Service Business Intelligence (SSBI) approach can enable users to be more self-reliant and less dependent on power users. Although SSBI promises more benefits compared to a traditional BI system, many organizations fail to implement SSBI. The literature review presented in this paper discusses six SSBI challenges related to “Access and use of data” and four challenges related to “Self-reliant users”. Awareness of these ten challenges can help practitioners avoid common pitfalls, when implementing SSBI, as well as guide SSBI researchers in focusing on their future research efforts.