[Blog Article] Even today most applications in SAP Business Intelligence (BI) are not very intuitive to use. There is still a lot of coding required for simple data queries and planning interactions. So employees in controlling, purchasing, investment management and other business departments often rely on their IT colleagues even though they already have too much to do anyway...
So far, so familiar. One thing, however, increasingly fails to match up for many business users: while many free programs and free apps are very intuitive to use without programming skills, they are very limited in their possibilities in highly professional SAP BI without ABAP and co.
Starting individual analytics about your own website and its visitors? No problem. Checking the distance to all car-sharing vehicles in the city from your couch? No problem. But adding a new sales outlet to the system and integrate its sales and personnel changes to the future reports - which are already recorded in the system anyway? Please allow your IT three days of development.
Although these examples are not comparable in terms of complexity and individuality, they illustrate the possibilities in other areas. And how few is possible in BI.
But improvement is in sight. The current trends of SAP for example, one of the big players in this market, are obvious (https://www.sap.com/products/analytics/business-intelligence-bi.html). The present keyword in SAP Business Intelligence is Self-Service BI and it focuses on enabling the business users of SAP Business Intelligence to work more independently and intuitively. The new study of IBsolution GmbH confirms this trend: https://ibsolution.de/4-faktoren-fuer-die-einfuehrung-von-bi-self-services/.
For planning functions, individual reports and so on, the detour via IT must not be necessary any longer. Users should be able to prepare their own analyzes and plans with just a few clicks and then be able to easily understand them.
The advantages for users are obvious. On the one hand, they save a lot of time by modeling their own plans and reports and IT capacity is not the limiting factor any more. On the other hand, the new independence and flexibility also enables them to adapt to the dynamics of their environment and to react flexibly to changes. Just as you would want them to.
With the SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC), SAP is taking a big step closer to achieving this goal. The surfaces are clear and the buttons are easy to understand. Since user are no longer even able to program and code themselves, the SAC really gives the impression of targeting business users. Creating models, connecting data and seeing reports in no time. Finally. Because in traditional user interfaces, so far, SAP users mainly had to resort to add-ons in order to make business departments more flexible.