Speed and agility are vital in today’s dynamic economy. But moving fast in the dark is dangerous. Decision makers need the insights and guidance they can only get from reliable data. But despite massive efforts from their internal BI teams, getting that data when and how they need it has been problematic.

For more than 20 years, dashboards served as a foundational element of business intelligence, helping leaders visualize and share valuable data across their organization. At inception, dashboards were the perfect vehicle for delivering key report KPIs without data workers needing a background in coding or IT. But much has changed over the last two decades, including the appetite and needs of your business users.

In a telecoms industry differentiated mainly by service and threatened by churn, gaining access to timely customer data initially drove internal demand for analytics and BI (ABI) reporting. When demand grew beyond customer service, our IT team really struggled to keep up. This set us off on a journey to find ways to help our colleagues to find insights and the answers to their questions themselves.

When dealing with payments, speed is king. Technology is increasing the speed at which innovation happens, and nowhere is that more apparent than how everyday commerce is transacted. Credit cards are now built with tap-to-pay capabilities, if you still even have a physical credit card. Phones have become the new credit card, with data from transactions and mobile banking adding to the overwhelming amount of data that can be collected.

Last year, Harvard Business Review and ThoughtSpot published a groundbreaking survey on the business benefits of empowering frontline workers with data. Revenues are higher, operations more efficient, customer service better, and employees happier. And yet, few organizations deploy BI this way, historically held back by the technology, conflicting priorities, and mindset.

Companies today are faced with an analytics conundrum. On one hand, there’s a higher demand than ever for actionable business insights, but on the other there’s limited resources to deliver BI content to on-technical business end-users. To fill this gap, the industry is increasingly turning to the next generation of self-service analytics tools. These tools reduce time to insight, speed up insight to action, and also allow BI teams to focus on more strategic analytics work.