11/03/2022
No data tool can ever help you achieve data literacy in your company.
The truth is: business intelligence problems are socio-technical problems, and you usually have to fix some combination of people (read: culture) and process and tool, all at the same time.
Self-service in the space is hard enough to define. Benn Stancil has a whole piece where he argues 'self-service is a feeling' โ which we largely agree with โ and Stancil says that self-service depends on how the org feels about self-serving data from their tools.
However, can we get more specific than โSS is a feelingโ?
To do so, weโd need to invert the question, define โself-serviceโ by what itโs not, and look into the โfailed stateโ of self-service.
You are a small company. You realize you need a data team, so you hire your first and you use Google Data Studio or Tableau or something. Your analyst churns out reports for management, and all is well for a few months. But eventually, your analyst can't keep up with all the requests she's getting, so you hire another. And another. And another. And then your company grows up, creates departments that report to different leaders, and each department hires their own analysts, and now you have an army of analysts in various parts of the company all writing queries or tuning Excel spreadsheets, just trying to keep up with the business requests your company throws at them.
These analysts are mostly English-to-SQL translators or Excel jockeys.
They're all relatively junior. Some are senior, sure. But there's not much career progression for them overall. And many of them are suitably displeased with their jobs, and a reliable percentage of them churns out (read: quits your company) every six months or so. You keep hiring new analysts to keep up with business demand and grit your teeth at the management challenge of constantly churning employees.
This is the failed state. And self-service, when seen through the lens of our inverted definition, is how far away you are from that failed state.
In an ideal world, self-service is a state where the business is sufficiently data-driven, but the data org does not look like an army of English-to-SQL translators. Youโd just need a smaller group of data folks that can service a much larger number of data consumers.
In other words, self-service business intelligence is most usefully described as a business outcome โ a place that you get to through a combination of tools and processes and org structure.
And the way you get to it is by asking yourself, each step of the way: "does this move bring us closer or further away from the failed state?"
In such a scenario, the best thing a tool can do is to not get in your way. The best thing a tool can do is to give you handles when you want to evolve your org away from the failed state. And that's what we have to do at Holistics.
