What is Your Approach to Self Service?

[AnalyticsWithJay]

Hi folks, hope all is well!

I'm curious to hear what your company's approach to "Self Service" has been? Specifically, I'm referring to opening up the capability for regular users to create Data Modules. This presents a significant risk as users could potentially bring down an environment with out of memory issues (bad joins on large data sets).

What kind of architecture have you implemented to try to avoid disruption of services? We are considering a secondary "exploratory" environment which essentially acts as a sandbox, and migrating data module solutions to production only after it has been vetted and approved.

All clients that I've spoken with who are using a single environment have been experiencing service disruptions. I'm meeting with IBM today to discuss, but would like to also gather your thoughts.

Cheers!
Jay

[Invisi]

For me, I notice you start with all kinds of technical stuff, where Self Service for me starts with the process and assessing the maturity of both the user community and the BI environment. Are users comfortable enough with BI principles to actually create useful BI applications, or will they just make Excel dumps? Are your frameworks end user friendly? Often this fails to be the case. Have all these issues been addressed?