What’s Next After Self-Service Analytics?

Over at least the last decade, we’ve seen a steady rise in the demand for self-service BI and analytical tools. More and more organizations realize the business value of their data for growing revenue, acquiring and retaining customers, streamlining operations, and lowering costs.

This realization has caused a shift in the power dynamic between IT and the business, underscored by the adoption of self-service analytical tools. Nevertheless, in most organizations IT still controls the bulk of the data and possesses the necessary skills and software resources to prepare data for analysis.

So it’s not surprising that the self-service trend has moved from analytics to data preparation and integration. Self-service data prep can enable analysts and citizen data scientists to operate with less assistance from IT. But it can also create a thorny set of information governance issues. In fact, the complexity of proliferating self-service data preparation tools far exceeds the relatively minor turbulence brought on by self-service analytics.

For more on this topic, watch Gartner analyst Rita Sallam and myself in a 20-minute video as we address the challenges of self-service data preparation and how Attivio’s semantic data catalog fits into this evolving ecosystem.