[drinkzima]

The straw man is always that self-serve fails because every user cannot use data well at work. The reality is some users will be inclined to solve their own problems and others will not, but self service is available to many users with deployed BI, and SQL is nearly always not the way they are doing it.

Most times I see this type of article, it's with folks that have never worked in a modeled BI tool. Salesforce data, for example, is very complex. But an ability to make a table of live opportunities with metadata and order them freely, next to usage data in an app is self service BI. It's not hard; it takes some setup; but it's self service.

The idea that folks can jump from business understanding to fully mapping the data as it lives in the data warehouse, on the other hand, is not trivial and won't be. The nuance of the real world is hard.

Different types of users need different interfaces - SQL all the way down to point and click. And there's no free lunch on modeling raw data to bring it to a consumable place for the company.

[snowfield]

Yes, provide different ways for different users to sove their own issues. Then technical people can solve the hard ones.