Companies in nearly every industry use data to make crucial decisions and fine-tune business operations. That's nothing new, and it's played an integral role in the growth of some of the most successful organizations today. That said, how businesses use data is changing.

In the past, the only people who could access, explore and harness data were those with the technical expertise to make sense of it. For example, most departments had to rely on data scientists and IT teams to ask questions and find the relevant information they needed.

While that approach worked for a while, things are much different today. Now, many organizations rely on a practice known as self-service business intelligence. Every department can use vast amounts of data through a business intelligence platform without a go-between.

A Self-Service Approach

The concept of self-service business intelligence is simple. Instead of having a data or IT team act as gatekeepers to data assets, that information is accessible to everyone. That includes marketing teams, frontline workers and more. Data analysis is integral to nearly every department in your organization, so why make it difficult for teams to access? Self-service intelligence is about expanding accessibility to achieve business objectives.

There are many ways to utilize self-service platforms. Sales teams can use data to create reports or forecast trends. Meanwhile, HR can make simple queries to find information about employee performance. Traditionally data and IT teams had to do all of that work. The old way of doing things negatively impacted efficiency and created an unnecessary barrier between valuable data and the teams that needed them.

Fortunately, a good business intelligence platform can address those issues and give users end-to-end control over how they analyze data. Intelligence software is plentiful, but the best platforms offer features that make data access as straightforward as possible while giving users the flexibility they need.

Platforms should connect to multiple data sources and offer options for data preparation. Users should also have the ability to interact with the data to create reports that meet their precise needs.

Author Resource:-

Emily Clarke writes about the best data catalog tools and data analysis softwares. You can find her thoughts at data catalog blog.