[bmh100]

I work in business intelligence, and my understanding of "self-service BI" has never been "no developer needed at any point" or even "unskilled knowledge work". I have always approached it as a particular environment. Specifically, BI team must produce the appropriate data lakes and interfaces to support user-driven design and simple aggregations. The BI team would model the data, optimize for analytical speed, apply business logic, improve data quality, etc. They would then create an interface with a "tool box" of dimensions, facts, and aggregations. At that point, the user takes over with the freedom to choose which dimensions and aggregations go into a chart, what type of visualization to use, and how to drill-down or slice-and-dice the data. That is true "self-service BI", and I have to be honest that I haven't encountered sales pitches with level of deceit claimed by the author.

[locusm]

> I haven't encountered sales pitches with level of deceit claimed by the author.

Get along to a Microsoft sales presso on Power BI for that.

[mistermann]

What would be an example of this deceit?

[blahi]

I am interested in this as well. Power BI is head and shoulders above anyone else in BI at the moment and I have never seen them make any deceitful claims. Every time it's "easy, but for advanced functionality you need DAX".

They are underselling it if anything, since it just punches so far beyond it's price point that most people who need entry-level BI would not understand how much of a good deal it is.

Self service means that you don't need to go through corporate IT, not that you need grand total of 0 dev skills. And even then, those tools abstract a lot of dev work. In the PowerBI case, DAX feels intuitive to anyone with Excel formulas experience. Other vendors have similar tooling.