Tag Archive for: self-service

When defining or assessing a Data & Analytics Strategy, Ironside leverages a proven framework of understanding the current state and comparing it to a desirable future state with a focus on six key areas, or pillars.

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Last spring, I had the opportunity to attend a local analytics conference with Dr. Claudia Imhoff as the keynote speaker. As she got on stage to begin her presentation, she started out by making a statement along the lines of “For every time the phrase ‘Big Data’ is mentioned today, we will all take a shot during happy hour.” 

(Tip: Don’t try that for this article.)

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Data democratization is the ability of an organization to provide information to end users in an easy and effective way. The goal is to provide self-service of information to end users with minimal IT support. There are many things that can go wrong when rolling out data democratization projects. The purpose of this article is to identify potential issues and provide guidance on how to avoid them in the democratization process.

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You’ve undoubtedly heard the term “Self-Service Analytics” thrown around, but what does self-service analytics actually look like in practice? What does a self-service user look like? And what prep work is needed to enable these people to serve themselves?

I spoke with Crystal Meyers, our resident Tableau guru and self-service analytics advocate to learn more. The following is a conversation with Crystal, where she explained some of the nuances of self-service analytics. Read more

If your organization is seeking to better manage its information as a corporate asset that is to be valued and capitalized, you’re likely focused on implementing programs that will catalyze measurable business results from mountains of business information that may be the product of the last decade or more of digital transformation initiatives. Read more

One size does not fit all. Try as they might, there is not a single BI platform that can offer every capability that users require. With organizational complexity increasing, and the growing demand for self-service analytics, it has become commonplace, even recommended, for organizations to maintain multiple BI platforms to meet the needs of people in diverse roles with differing needs across the organization. Read more

Ironside’s Crystal Meyers was featured in Vol. 19, No. 4 of TDWI’s Business Intelligence Journal. Her points are particularly relevant as business analytics begins a more pronounced shift toward a bimodal model in 2016.

Reprinted with permission of 1105 Media, Inc. As published in TDWI’s Business Intelligence Journal. Read more


You might have missed it if you weren’t closely following the situation or already using the platform, but around the middle of last month IBM forever changed the concept of self-service analytics when they quietly moved Watson Analytics out of beta and into general availability. Watson Analytics is a new cloud-based application that enables an individual to work with their data at a level of ease and intuitiveness that we’ve not seen before. As a sibling of the IBM Watson family, it has inherited a powerful natural language processing capability and as such it enables an individual to query data not with a programming language like SQL, but in the form of a natural language dialogue. Read more

Tag Archive for: self-service