What is Self-Service BI?
Self-service BI lets non-technical people explore data and build their own reports without waiting for an analyst or engineer.
Self-Service BI explained
The aim is to remove the queue: the person with the question gets the answer directly. Tools provide drag-and-drop interfaces, curated datasets and, more recently, natural-language questions.
It works best on top of well-defined, trusted data. Without shared definitions, different people produce different numbers for the same metric.
Example
A marketing manager filters a prepared campaign dataset by channel and month to build her own report, with no request to the data team.