The balance of power is shifting from IT to the business, according to a new report from Gartner.
The rise of data discovery, access to multi-structured data, data preparation tools and smart capabilities is expected to further democratise access to analytics and stress the need for governance.
Rita Sallam, research vice president at Gartner, said: "Data preparation is one of most difficult and time-consuming challenges facing business users of BI and data discovery tools, as well as advanced analytics platforms."
"However, data preparation capabilities are emerging that will provide business users and analysts the ability to extend the scope of self-service to include information management, and extract, transform and load functions, enabling them to access, profile, prepare, integrate, curate, model and enrich data for analysis and consumption by BI and analytics platforms."
"Self-service data integration will do for traditional IT-centric data integration what data discovery platforms have done for traditional IT-centric BI: reduce the significant time and complexity users face in preparing their data for analysis and shift much of the activity from IT to the business user to better support governed data discovery," said Ms Sallam.
"However, specific skills are required. Self-service data integration requires that users master both the technical aspects and the business requirements of joining data together."
Gartner has predicted that basic business user data mashup capabilities will become mainstream as part of data discovery tools in the near future.
The demand is likely to add value to the data discovery and traditional BI vendors who are likely to extend their own business user data mashup capabilities to include more advanced preparation features.
Gartner also expects that by 2017, most data discovery tools will have incorporated smart data discovery capabilities to expand the reach of interactive analysis.
Additionally, less than 10% of self-service BI initiatives are expected to be governed sufficiently to prevent inconsistencies that adversely affect the business, through 2016.
Due to an increase in end-user desire for access to business data, and IT’s inability to satisfy this need, a growth in self-service BI initiatives has been created.
Doug Laney, research vice president at Gartner, said: "As a result of the limited governance of self-service BI implementations, we see few examples of those that are materially successful — other than in satisfying end-user urges for data access."
"This, combined with increasing examples of data privacy and security breaches, along with anticipated instances of public disclosure inconsistencies, will temper businesses leaders’ enthusiasm for self-service BI. From unfortunate occurrences like these, we expect resulting investor and customer blowback for organisations with ungoverned, or loosely governed, BI initiatives."
Gartner added that a return to more controlled enterprise BI implementations is expected, or the deployment of self-service BI technologies within a better governed, IT-led project environment.
