‘Easy to use’ is commonly heard but just as often proves at least a little misleading. How many times have you been assured that a software tool was easy to use, but after delving in, it quickly turns into a marathon YouTube session?
In the world of aspirant citizen BI experts, ‘easy to use’ reared its beguiling head with software company Cirrus TechVue claiming it has the elixir of ease on tap.
The company’s director Colyn Dee hopped on a Teams call to spread the word, delivering an introduction to and demonstration of a Zagrebian BI set-up called Kyubit Business Intelligence.
“It’s only a 34-megabyte download, and I got it installed and doing stuff in about 10 minutes,” says Dee.
He is, however, a veteran of the technology industry and that presupposes a level of knowledge and experience unlikely to be enjoyed by the everyman.
Be that as it may, “if you ask me, after 40 years or so in this business, there’s a lot of over-complication for various reasons, be it empire building or just plain stupidity. Seeing a tool like this, then, really confirms that you can get good results without teams of business analysts, data specialists and other expensive people.”
The original question begged, though: Is it really easy to use?
Contextualising it, Dee says yes for anyone with fairly advanced Excel skills, and preferably some knowledge and experience with SQL databases, and – crucially – an interest in asking questions that yield useful insights..
It was the complexity and cost of more big-name BI that got Dee sniffing around for better answers. Working with the National Financial Ombud Scheme (NFO) – an amalgamation of industry bodies – he says a bit of project creep both exposed the cost and complexity associated with enterprise-level BI.
“I realised a couple of things. Firstly, doing simple tasks in these systems is easy, but you might as well do that in a spreadsheet. Secondly, doing more complex tasks requires a lot of specialist knowledge, like a degree in data analytics.”
The average South African SME owner or manager could probably benefit from the results of some of those more complex tasks, reckons Dee. And the average South African SME manager can get stuck right in, starting with data as simple as that in the spreadsheet you probably already have. “Yes, you can use data in a CSV file, or if it’s formatted as a table in Excel.”
After spending an hour checking out tasks like creating and connecting data sources, setting up and executing analyses and drag-and-drop dashboarding, it was clear that yes, accessible and affordable BI is a thing. The promised land is out there.
For Dee, what remains most important to anyone looking to get value from analysis isn’t the tool. Instead, it will always rest on curiosity combined with context: “So long as you know why you need analysis, so long as you can formulate the questions you want answered… it doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg to get the tools you need,” he says.
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