The purpose of this document is to provide Pyramid Analytics customers with an actionable, high-level framework, guidance and tips to successfully deliver governed self-service BI across the enterprise. Although ad-hoc reporting tools have come a long way the past few years, most of the tools in the market today have significant governance gaps.

Self-service BI governance involves a partnership between business and IT leaders on how to best empower everyone to make data-driven decisions efficiently and responsibly. Analytics guides interactions, informs decisions, drives processes and ensures better outcomes. In balancing organization and individual needs, a collaborative initiative considers various user perspectives and reporting use cases. Since everyone must participate, governance requires an organizational reporting culture change.

In summary, effective self-service BI governance processes are essential to ensure users are viewing high-quality, relevant data for decision-making. They also help users understand standards for creating and sharing reports responsibly.

Pyramid Analytics provides organizations with an intuitive administrative framework to publish and share content. Administrators can configure role-based access using group security profiles and track lineage and versioning at the storyboard level to gain complete telemetry on how users are consuming content.

Data is at the heart of every organization.

In the journey to become more data-driven in decision making, we are seeing unprecedented democratization of data and adoption of self-service analytics. Rigid data collection and reporting processes of the past have given way to rapid gathering of raw, unstructured and crowdsourced data. As a result of that change, there are inevitable trade-offs with data quality.

Self-service visual analytics solutions often quickly expose data quality issues that you may not even realize exist. Unfortunately, inaccurate data undermines the powerful value of self-service analytics. If people don't trust your reports, they won’t use them. Since self-service analytics credibility, adoption and success hinges on accurate data, data quality should be given more attention as you implement these solutions.

Every organization today depends on data to understand its customers and employees, design new products, reach target markets, and plan for the future. Accurate, complete, and up-to-date information is essential if you want to optimize your decision making, avoid constantly playing catch-up and maintain your competitive advantage.

While they throw numerous cross-department teams at the problem or embark on yet another technology initiative, year after year organizations continuously labor through the reporting process, delivering bland, formulaic reports that provide little decision-making value.

Many business intelligence (BI) solutions in the marketplace today—the very tools designed to interrogate data and produce meaningful insights—are only making things worse.

Meanwhile, emergent self-service BI tools promise to empower end users and improve speed to insight. While they can produce attractive data visualizations in dashboard style reports, they haven’t made it any easier to produce the professional, narrative-style reports that many business leaders require.

In this paper, we explore these in greater detail, discuss why many BI solutions fall short, and explain how Pyramid Analytics excels in each of these key areas.