While the data flows generated within a company grow more torrid and complex by the day, the structures to contain this information adapt by becoming both more elaborated and complicated to see through. In daily life business life on the other hand it has become of vital importance for the average non-IT user to access and use this information to take business relevant decisions.
This growing discrepancy between IT side and the needs of the average user is met by the concept of self-service business intelligence. It can be understood as a layer hiding the complexities of the IT structures below and enabling intuitive and simple handling of data.
There has been a growing amount of self-service BI solutions both by speciality vendors and global IT players. Based on surveys conducted to work out the state-of-the art products in the field, the goal of this thesis is to analyse the leading self-service business intelligence front-end tools.
To do so, we elaborated several steps in the making of reports as well as a concrete business scenario to test the tools. This allowed us to make a structured review of each tool and work out their common points and differences.