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Figure 4. Division of end-users
BI requires a flexible and quick requirements
process. Therefore, it is important to have a sub-
stantial amount of power users in each process
that can assist novice users. Especially, because
in addition to the required tool and analytical
skills, power users also possess the required busi-
ness knowledge (in contrast to organization wide
BI support) in order to support the novice users
in their process. Therefore, power users play an
important role to ensure the required flexibility of
the BI process. In addition to the above findings,
it was also investigated how many end-users are
present in each segment. Figure 4 shows that the
focus is largely on novice usage (i.e. information
consumers) with considerably less power users
and hardly any expert users. Although it was
expected to have less power and expert users
than novice users, because of the higher demands
placed on their individual capabilities, especially
the power user group was expected to be bigger.
Furthermore, following Negash and Gray (2003)
most BI tooling focuses on the power user. In
addition, Gile (2003, p. 2) states that “more than
75 percent of the costs associated with BI are for
technology that addresses the needs of informa-
tion producers”. Perhaps this is a signal for BI
vendors to start developing tooling that aim at
bringing more analytical functions to novice us-
ers. However, obviously we must be aware that
not only the ability to use a tool can help to make
an end-user a good analyst, also the analytical
abilities and business knowledge are important.
Investigating the relationship between infor-
mation producers and consumers, in general two
opinions prevail. In short, 40% of the respondents
stressed that end-users should not be limited in
their possibilities, and therefore should get com-
plete tool access, offering the end-user as much
flexibility as possible. The latter 60% stress that
end-users only be provided with ad-hoc and or
advanced analytics, when it is required for their
task. The first approach offers maximum flexibility
to end-users. However, on the other hand often
most end-users are hardly using ad-hoc and or
advanced analytics, and if it is used occasionally,
time and money is lost because end users are not
experienced, which results in inefficient usage. In
addition, taking into account the risk for errors,
definition usage, (full) license costs and training,
it seems like the benefits outweigh the advantage
of flexibility.
Last but not least, it is interesting to see that
hardly any expert users were around. Because of
the absence of expert users, it seems like the added
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