Planning for business intelligence adoption - Business Intelligence in Microsoft SharePoint 2013 - page 22

Business user communities
When it comes to BI, business users are likely to have different information needs, depending on their
technical skills, the types of decisions they make, and how they need to save and share their insights.
In several different ways, business users with common characteristics can be grouped into separate
user communities. By understanding the needs of these business user communities from a variety of
perspectives, you can select the tools that best support those needs.
Understanding your audience: Casual users vs. power users
One common way to differentiate business users is to separate them into two communities—casual
users and power users. Casual users might be department managers, executives, or even external
stakeholders such as customers or suppliers. Casual users tend to be infrequent users of BI, perhaps
once per week or less, whereas power users are often daily consumers of BI.
Because casual users spend less time with BI, their skill level with BI tools is much lower than that of
power users, so the interfaces to such tools must be simple so that they can find the information they
need on their own. For these users, a web-based reporting application works well. The tools that help
a casual user interact with data and develop insights tend to be very simple and focused on specific
sets of data.
But, making tools simple for casual users often makes them too simple for power users, who typi-
cally require access to a wide variety of data and need more on-demand analytical capabilities. Power
users spend enough time working regularly with BI tools that they develop advanced technical skills.
These users, typically business analysts and analytical modelers, need tools that give them the ability
to explore the data and create visualizations.
Another way to distinguish casual users and power users is by assessing their familiarity with the
data. It's quite possible that a person can be quite knowledgeable about the data in his own depart-
ment and thus qualify as a power user, requiring a more analytical BI tool for daily work. It's also
possible that this same person has access to data in another department but is less familiar with that
data. For that situation, this user needs a basic reporting tool that simplifies information access.
In their topic Business Intelligence: Making Better Decisions Faster (2002, Microsoft Press), Elizabeth
Vitt, Michael Luckevich, and Stacia Misner further separate the casual users into two groups: informa-
tion users and information consumers. Figure 2-1 presents the relationship of all three groups graphi-
cally, in which the pyramid shows the relative size of each group.