Orchestrated, not abandoned: the hidden cost of self-service analytics

Self-service analytics was a good idea. Give people the data and the tools, and they will find their own answers without waiting for a central team. In many companies it worked for a while. Then the dashboards multiplied, the numbers stopped matching and the questions came back to the central team, with an extra one attached: which number is right?

The costs nobody budgeted

• Duplicate work. Five teams build five versions of the same report, each slightly different.
• Conflicting numbers. Meetings start with a debate about definitions instead of a decision.
• Stale logic. A rule written two years ago by someone who has since left still drives a monthly report.
• Findings with no owner. A dashboard shows a problem. Nobody is responsible for acting on it.
• Tools without users. Licences renew whether anyone logs in or not.

Access is not the problem

The answer isn't to take the tools away. It is to stop treating analytics as something people do on their own and start treating it as a system somebody runs.

What orchestration means

1. One set of definitions. Revenue, margin, a duplicate payment: each is defined once and used everywhere.
2. Tests, not dashboards. Instead of asking people to look for problems, the system checks for them and raises an exception.
3. Every exception has an owner. A finding goes to a named person, with a value and a deadline.
4. Someone tunes it. Thresholds, rules and data sources are maintained as the business changes.
5. Value is counted. What was found, what was fixed and what it was worth is reported every month.

Where CoSaaS fits

One of the principles behind CoSaaS is that analytics should be orchestrated, not abandoned. We don't hand over a tool and leave. We run the system with your team, so the analytics keep producing decisions after the launch excitement fades. Read the whole model in What is CoSaaS?, or the principles in the CoSaaS manifesto.