For as long as I’ve been involved with the field, the hard-headed school of "we need a cost benefit analysis" or "build me an ROI justification" has defined the business-benefit of BI as mainly its ability to "speed up and improve decision making". With the rise of self-service BI, the first part of that aspiration has been successfully satisfied. People are getting decision-relevant data quickly. However, the second outcome -- improved decision making -- is a less certain result (and also much harder to model in an ROI calculation than is agility). The difference in learning What is it that… [Continue Reading]