I wonder what people here think. Would self serve BI work for something which is more context specific? So for example self serve BI for your own sales. What would it take? Why not?
This has been the basic truth of any self-serve BI system I've used.
Even in smallish orgs there are often three steps - the engineer who instruments code/implements a metric, the engineer who builds the ETL pipeline into the underlying BI warehouse, and the person querying that data. So there are minimally three people in potentially three different roles who need a shared specification and understanding.
Also, self-serve BI tools can be surprisingly opaque and their output can be hard to validate/test. So even if you know accurately what data you are querying, testing that your query is what you intend is hard.
General-purpose self-serve is hostile to non-technical end users. Most do not have the mental model of SQL to guide their usage of the tool, so giving them an “open-ended” option to run their own vizes ends up really being a fence-toss of some technobabble garbage that isn’t useful to them at all.
“Slice n’ Dice”-style filtering added to an existing set of reports, however, is a completely viable middle ground. Practically speaking, this means writing the basic dashboard query, then hooking a bunch of query parameters up to some front-end UI widgets to let end users pick the date range, level-of-detail, filter which trendlines or categories of data are shown, etc. Just use good taste to avoid going overboard - don’t try to make every last detail configurable.
I wholeheartedly agree that just giving a business user access to the straight database is not ideal for all the issues mentioned - they don't know the context and the gotchas in the data combined with probably not understanding how to write SQL. I think an effective data warehouse strategy with straightforward data marts of materialized views can simplify the interaction and maybe even make it really simple for someone to generate basic visualizations. A lot of business people can make basic dashboards in Excel which, worst case, could be connected to a data mart. It's not going to handle BIG data but may cover a large number of use cases for most businesses.
I'm in favor of creating some basic dashboards We've also been experimenting with embedding dashboards in internal tools that provide some slice and dice capabilities but with a high level filter. A user can manipulate and tweak a dashboard for a specific customer but to look at a different customer they need to navigate to it in the internal tools, not via the dashboard.