Self-service analytics community is a group of people who share the common interest about self-service analytics and common value about data-driven decision-making culture.

Why people are motivated for the internal self-service community?

The self-service community motivations are as followings:

• Empowerment: Self-service stems from – and affects – a wider macro trend of DIY on one hand, and collaboration on the other hand: content builders are taking the lead for services they require, and often collaborate with others. The key is to offer the members empowerment and control over the process, so they can choose the level of services they would like to engage in, thus affecting the overall experience.
• Convenience: The benefit of community self-service is obvious – they can get fast access to the information they need without having to email or call IT or a contact center. According to Forrester, 78% of people prefer to get answers via a company’s website versus telephone or email.
• Engagement: It is their shared ideas, interests, professions that bring people together to form a community. The members join in because they wish to share, contribute and learn from one another. Some members contribute, while others benefit from the collective knowledge shared within the community. This engagement is amplified when members induce discussion and debate about tools, features, processes and services provided and any new products that are being introduced. The discussions within the community inform and familiarize people with the new and better ways of getting things done – the best practices.

How to start creating an internal user community?

When you start creating an internal user community, you need to keep in mind that a lot of community activities are completely dependent on intranet. So you need to ensure that the community is one that can be easily accessed by the maximum number of people. Below is the checklist:

• Determine a purpose or goal for it. One example: The place you find anything and everything about self-service analytics. Community is the place of sharing, learning, collaborating….
• Decide who your target audience will be. Most likely audience should be those content developers and future content developers. Mostly likely the audiences are not the server end users.
• Design the site keeping in mind the tools for interaction and the structure of your community.
• Decide upon the manner in which you will host the community.
• Create the community using tools available within your organization.
• Create interesting content for the community.
• Invite or attract members to join your community. Try to find out who has the developer licenses and send invitation to all of them.
• Administer it properly so that the community flourishes and expands. It is a good practice to have at least two volunteers as moderators who make sure to answer user’s questions timely and close out all open questions if possible.

Who are the community members?

The audiences are all the content builders or content developers from business and IT across organization. Of course, the governing body or council members are the cores of the community. It is a good practice that council members lead most if not all the community activities. The community audiences also include future potential content builders. Council should put some focuses to reach out to those potential content builders. The end information consumers, those who get dashboards or reports, are normally not parts of the community, as end information consumers really do not care too much tools, technology or processes associated with the self-service. All end information consumers care is the data, insights and actions.

What are the community activities?

The quick summary is in the below picture. More detailed will be discussed later on.

• Intranet: Your community home. It is the place for everything and everything about your self-service analytics. The tool, process, policies, best practices, system configuration, usage, data governance polices, server policies, publishing process, license purchasing process, tip, FAQ, etc.
• Training: The knowledge base at community intranet is good but is not good enough. Although most of the new self-service tools are designed for easy of use, they do have a few learning curves. Training has to be organized to better leverage the investment.
• User Meetings: User summit or regular best practice sharing is one must have community activity.
• License Model: When a lot of business super users have dashboard development tools, what is most cost effective license model for dashboard development tools? Do you want to charge back for the server usage?
• Support Process: Who support the dashboards developed by business super users? What is IT’s vs. business’ role in support end users?
• External Community: Most self-service software vendors have ver active local or virtual or industrial community. How to leverage external community? How to learn the best practices?

Key takeaway: Build a strong community is the critical piece for success self-service analytics deployment in enterprise.

Please next blogs for Multi-tendance strategy