Self Service BI - Where the Rubber Met the Road in 2010 for Microsoft Dynamics

A hot topic this year for the Microsoft Dynamics ecosystem, and specifically for Dynamics AX customers, has been the shift in thinking about successful business intelligence solutions. The lessons learned from past BI projects have led customers and implementers alike to look to a new ideal in tearing down information silos, liberating report development capabilities, and empowering information workers with what is often described today as self service BI.

The ideal of self service BI takes into consideration operational, functional, analytical concerns of good BI, and it is now forcing customers, implementers, and software vendors to re-think the most challenging facets of business intelligence.

Microsoft started us on this path a few years back after taking a close look at the BI landscape. They knew that in any traditional BI implementation there were inevitably a handful of producers and consumers of the reporting.  In looking at this approach, which created information silos and information voids at companies, Microsoft saw a huge gap.

The gap was seen in how information workers for companies, large and small, dealt with BI elements, and interacted with the underlying data.

What they saw at the top level was a pretty good toolset that was fairly robust but rigid in its approach and restricted to a few top employees. It took time to dissect information and deliver reports and elements, and those consumers often times would be looking at information that was "rear view" in orientation. Kind of like driving a car in reverse through the rear view mirror.

With this type of limited BI deployment, a majority of the company that could have used information was left in the dark. And in this environment, we saw companies taking and using tools like Excel to ...