Enterprise BI and end-user BI

Organizations are becoming ever more data-driven. An organization that assesses performance on key performance indicators, or KPIs, uses dashboards reflecting the status for each KPI. These dashboards are typically highly standardized: the organization has reflected on the business strategy, business processes, how to measure the KPIs, and how to report on them. An automated dashboard with KPIs is relatively stable and will not change much, and is typically built and maintained by a central IT department or BI competence center.

The next level of being a data-driven organization is that every decision taken can be based on insights from relevant data. This means that the need for a more dynamic form of analytics arises, one that can answer ad hoc questions. This form of analytics is marketed as self-service BI and promises that everyone can build a BI solution without the help of a central IT department. From the Five-Layer model, it is clear...