[dworin]

In my experience "expertise in making sense of data" is only one piece of the puzzle, and often not even the most important one.

Domain expertise is hugely important at making sense of data. Self-service allows domain experts to quickly look at data themselves. They may have to learn skills in data-sensemaking, but the expert in data will have to learn about the specific domain (often much harder).

I'm noticing that more and more people in a variety of fields have at least a passable understanding of how to make sense of data. For quick questions, self-service access to data makes the process much faster with little risk.

I've been in organizations that tried to put data behind gatekeepers who would protect users from making mistakes. In those cases, we made a lot more mistakes because not enough analysis was done, or people didn't have access to data.

I've been in other organizations where we let everyone look at the data. Sure, some people made mistakes, but we used that as an opportunity to teach.

If I had to bet on which type of firm would win, I'd bet on the latter. I'm deeply skeptical of the promises made by BI vendors, but self-service analytics isn't one of them.