Why I Hate "Self-Service"

OK, I confess. I don’t hate the idea of Self-Service. I love it, in fact. How else can enterprises deal with shrinking IT budgets and increasing IT backlog? As our employees become ever more tech-savvy, they can and should have more hands-on tools at their disposal. If organizations don’t supply them, Rogue IT will find less safe, less reliable, less repeatable ways to do it.

I know from first-hand experience that IT shops, at least the progressive ones, want to embrace Self-Service solutions. Taking some of the work out of their hands certainly addresses their budget and time-crunch issues. But even the most extreme Self-Service software solution leaves IT to do the ‘infrastructure’ work such as installing/configuring the self-service software, and integrating it with security and governance tools. In other words, IT builds the roads and business users drive their cars on them.

And that’s what I hate about “Self-Service”. It implies a complete lack of IT involvement. And this couldn’t be further from the truth. Unfortunately there are companies (and software vendors) without any real ability or inclination to deliver self-service to their user community and they perpetuate this misunderstanding as a way to defend or justify their self-serviceless approach. There are dictators and slow-adopters in every culture, and it can help to understand their true motivations.

Of course, Self-Service can also suffer from the opposite problem: Self-Service that is not self-service at all, and is still an IT-driven effort . How many times have you been given a few check-boxes on a report and had it called "Self-Service"? There is a perfect middle, if you will. In the case of Business Intelligence, Claudia Imhoff and Colin White paint a definitive, practical picture in their report 'Self-Service Business intelligence: Empowering Users to Generate Insights', summarized this way:

So maybe a better phrase would be ‘Hands On’ or ‘Business Friendly’. But one thing couldn’t be more clear: the future will mean more Self-Service for business users and they will get it one way or the other. It’s time we all agree what that really means and get to work on it.