Enabling Self-Service BI through a Dimensional Model Management Warehouse

The promise of Self-Service Business Intelligence (BI) is its ability to give business users access to selection, analysis, and reporting tools without requiring intervention from IT. However, while some progress has been made through tools such as SAS Enterprise Miner, IBM SPSS Modeler, and RapidMiner, analytical modeling remains firmly in the domain of IT departments and data scientists. The development of tools that mitigate the need for modeling expertise remains the “missing link” in selfservice BI, but prior attempts at developing modeling languages for nontechnical audiences have gone largely unadopted. This paper seeks to address this unmet need, bringing model-building to a mainstream business audience by introducing a structured methodology for model formulation specifically designed for practitioners. We also describe the design for a dimensional Model Management Warehouse that supports our methodology and demonstrate its viability using an illustrative example. The paper concludes by outlining several areas for future research.