Self-service BI was supposed to free the data team. Give everyone a BI tool, teach them to drag and drop, and they'll answer their own questions. The data team can stop building dashboards and focus on infrastructure.
That's not what happened.
What happened: everyone builds their own dashboards with their own metric definitions. Marketing's "active users" counts monthly logins. Product's "active users" counts weekly feature usage. Finance's "active users" counts paying customers. Three dashboards, three numbers, one term. The data team now spends their time reconciling conflicting metrics instead of building.
Self-service BI without governed metrics is just self-service chaos.
What is self-service BI?
