Self-service reporting is when business users have the ability to create personalized reports and analytical queries without requiring the IT department to get involved.

There will be some basic work that the IT department must do, namely creating the various data marts that the reporting tools will use as well as deploying those reporting tools. However, once that is done, IT will be freed of creating reports so that they can work on other tasks. Instead, the people who know the data best—the business users—will be able to build the reports.

Here is a typical scenario that occurs when a self-service reporting solution is not in place: a business user wants a report created, so they fill out a report request that gets routed to IT. The IT department is backlogged with report requests, so it takes them weeks to get back to the user. When they do, they interview the user to get more details about exactly what data the user wants on the report and...