Self-Service BI is a good, and still improving answer for bridging the Business Intelligence technology and business gap. More than just tools and technology, Self-Service BI involves a commitment to cooperation and continuous—organic—improvement. With the right tools and cooperation between IT and business, it's now possible to provide long-term and high-quality managed data while also giving businesses the capability to meet their information needs in their needed time frame.

The Self-Service tools, such as Power Pivot, Power View, and the Analysis Services Tabular Model introduced with the SQL Server 2012, allow business resources to acquire, analyze, and share information relatively independent of IT and with a relatively low requirement for technical skill—the emphasis is on "relatively". It is possible for a business person to acquire data from a variety of resources through the use of tools provided by wizards and graphical interfaces. However, there remains the need for a higher than average technical capability—not a developer level but an analyst level resource is the typical profile. Also, though there is no requirement to involve IT or the managed data environment, these resources remain a source of considerable capability and information, and Self-Service users should look to them first to check if their needs may be met.

Traditional managed data and emerging Self-Service BI are, therefore, not competitive nor alternative technologies but rather complimentary technologies that together are a comprehensive, robust, and nimble information environment. Self-Service BI is the pointed end of the spear in which analysts self-serving information are in direct contact with the business and are tasked with responding quickly to information requests. As such, these analysts are the first to be aware of emerging and recurring questions and the information needs that answer those questions. By regularly harvesting this knowledge, those in charge of maintaining the managed data environment have a clear direction as to how their environment should evolve. Incorporating the newly identified, and vetted by Self-Service, sources and business rules for analysis into the data warehouse continuously improves the quality and depth of the still very valuable managed data environment.