Does your IT team build one-off reports on request? Should they be doing this?

Truth or myth? It’s best to treat your IT team as a service that builds one-off reports on request.

When we think of BI and analytics, we often think of business leaders and managers pouring themselves into rich dashboards and orchestrating data-driven strategies to drive innovation. Images like these are ubiquitous. In reality, many business leaders and managers find themselves waiting for a response on the ticket they filed with IT for a report only the IT team has the access and expertise to produce.

Why business people turn to IT for reporting:

How else would it get done?

According to Deloitte, 67% of managers and executives are not comfortable accessing or using data from their analytics tools. This discomfort has only perpetuated the belief that the IT team—comfortable with technology—is best for the reporting job.

It is often just the next logical step in adopting a BI tool: your IT team has helped usher the tool into the organization, integrated the tool into the data fabric of the organization, and now it’s only natural for people to view the IT team as the expert and owner of the tool.

In reality, this might be the biggest people-related myth about business intelligence and analytics. Before you know it, IT becomes the bottleneck as business people rely upon them to pull reports and make changes to reports regularly. This routine practice delays the availability of timely data and disempowers decision-makers from embracing and fully leveraging their organization’s data.

Instead of watching the IT tickets pile up, analytics can and should live where decisions are made. And your IT team should focus on their core mission.

The truth is… you can let your IT team focus on their core mission, not on building reports.

Our latest guide, Mythbusting Business Intelligence vs. Decision Intelligence, debunks the myth of IT and reporting, showing how business people can access and prepare data for analysis on their own.

Your IT team brings significant value as administrators and managers of the data and analytics stack. They are in charge of balancing data security and access and optimizing infrastructure investments to manage costs. There’s no need to distract them from their core mission by having them spend countless hours manually producing and reproducing reports.

The creation and upkeep of the reports should be with the business, the place where decisions are made. The right analytics platform allows business people to be self-sufficient, accessing and preparing data for analysis independently, without waiting for IT.

Decision intelligence to the rescue.

At Pyramid Analytics, we’re working to dispel the myths about analytics and business intelligence holding people back and failing to deliver value in today’s world. There are many reasons why self-service analytics and BI technology are falling short, but there are becoming fewer reasons to continue living with the shortcomings.

With a decision intelligence platform, organizations can benefit from a no-code, point-and-click browser experience that empowers any person, from the novice to the data scientist, to make data-driven decisions.

We invite you to read our Mythbusting Business Intelligence vs. Decision Intelligence guidebook to learn more about this and many other widely held beliefs about business intelligence and analytics today. We break down the myths into categories related to data, people, and analytics and show you how, with a new approach, you can move past these limiting beliefs to take your analytics to the next level through decision intelligence. Get instant access to the Mythbusting guide here (no registration required).