From an information consumer to an information author: a new approach to business intelligence

Self-Service Business Intelligence (SSBI) enables business users, such as executives, managers, analysts, and knowledge workers to build reports on a need-basis to support their decisions and actions toward business success. This suggests that business users are empowered not only to consume information but also to author it. Yet, research on SSBI is mainly concentrated at the industrial level, and furthermore little is known on the way SSBI is changing the current state of BI. To address this lack of knowledge, this study explores the attributes of SSBI that are necessary to extend the role of a business user beyond that of an information consumer by drawing on the literature of Self-Service Technologies (SST). This study provides a new definition of SSBI as a new approach to BI. Furthermore, it highlights the duality of high levels of co-production and low levels of dependency as key to the SSBI approach.