Self-service business intelligence : A study on the Swedish market

In a time where information is ever present and in large quantities, it becomes of extreme importance to organisations to find a way to store and analyse all this information in order to maintain their position on the market. One way to deal with this, which has been adopted by large company groups as well as smaller organisation, is the use of business intelligence, BI. This feature helps organisations to store and analyse information and provide analytical reports to support decision making. Despite the fact that BI has been around for a couple of decades it is still a rather new phenomena with a couple of problem areas which has been highlighted by several international studies and articles. Sweden as a market has been considered as somewhat of a pioneer when it comes to IT-development in general and early usage of business intelligence as well as the emerging trend in the business intelligence market; self-service BI. This solution aims to make business intelligence more user friendly in order to increase the amount of users and ease the pressure on IT-departments within organisations. The purpose of this study is to identify these problems and investigate whether they can be applied to decision makers on the Swedish market and if self-service BI is affecting these problems. The study was done by using a survey with 46 respondents from different organisations located in Sweden. The result shows that the problem areas were not recognised by the majority of the respondents and there were correlations between user-friendliness and how often the respondents used self-service BI