Probably too late in the day (1 month plus) but not all of the DIY analysis products are snake oil – I am talking about ours (Monarch), naturally

Instead of using databases as the source, we use standard reports, so all the hard work has been done, as regards data cleansing, business value, auditing etc.

In addition, the data, layout and relationships are familar to the business user, so they are easily able to extract the data they need without having to worry about database-centric concepts.

Now I don’t claim that we offer high-end BI, most users will eventually export the results of their model into Excel and maybe do some more work there, but it does make the users self-sufficient without the types of risks you are talking about.

The users (mainly finance) are domain experts in the reports they use on a daily basis, so they can easily identify the data they need and extract and analyse it, without IT involvement.

In addition, the analysis can always be tracked back to an absolutely authoritative source – the reports they rely on for business operations, as well as audit and regulatory purposes.

The controls are already in place as regards who is allowed to view those reports, and they are pretty much always archived – so analysis can be checked back for years, if needs be.

In addition, it can be the only way to analyse some “point-in-time” reports where replicating the business logic on top of the database that generated that instance of reporting data is just not feasible.

Don’t want this to seem like an ad, but it just hurt a little to be considered a snake-oil merchant.

Check out our forums if you want an independent user opinion.

Gareth

However, I must disagree with you again. Every new BI product purports to do just what you said, give users control over their data. I’ve sat through a number of them just in the past year from smaller, proprietary products, to high end BI solutions from Business Objects/SAP. What they all gloss over is the requirement of creating relationships between the tables and the experienced required to do so.

I may be a bit cynical as the primary databases I’ve been working with for the last decade are not well designed or documented. Therefore, your analogy doesn’t accurately represent the situations I’ve worked on.

A more accurate analogy would be to flying an airplane. It has wheels, engine(s), brakes (flaps), gauges, etc just like a car. Both are used for transportation and some cars can move as fast as some airplanes. In fact, until the last few years, I could pick up any number of video games which give you the feeling that you could pilot an airplane. This is clearly not the case.

Can users manipulate their own data effectively and accurately? Yes. However, the underlying queries must be provided to them if the reports they want are anything more difficult than dragging and dropping (creating links) from one field to another.

I won’t pretend to have the level of experience that you have, but every one of these DIY data analysis products has been akin to selling snake oil.