Getting Started with Self-Service Analytics: version 2.2
Self-Service Analytics provides a very rich environment for collaborative analytics. It will allow you:- organize and search your organization's work through a standard web browser,
- collaborate with your colleagues (we believe that a shared understanding makes for better decisions), and
- analyze your customer data from your desk.
But we realise that the breadth of possibilities can be quite daunting
to new users — so we've picked out a few suggestions of how you
can get started. In each case we've provided a little demonstration to
give you an idea how Self-Service Analytics can be used (marked with a 
), but also included links to
the documentation — so you have instructions on how you can do
this your self (marked with a 
).
If you want to ... |
If you want to watch a short demo ... |
If you want to know what's possible with Self-Service Analytics
Start by exploring the feature highlights or reviewing the full list of features and functions delivered by Self-Service Analytics. Further information is available on the Self-Service Analytics website. Finally, the Self-Service Analytics Reference Guide contains documentation on how to complete specific tasks in Self-Service Analytics and a glossary to terms and concepts within Self-Service Analytics.If you want to view what would go into an example project
When Self-Service Analytics is installed two sample demonstration projects (from Finance and Telecommunication sectors) are provide as examples of how a collaborative project could be run, and what types of results would be tracked within Self-Service Analytics. These are fully functioning projects — not just a set of static pages. We encourage you to- browse the contents of these projects ,
- add additional comments to the posts , and
- analyze the data published within the projects — which requires a login with the appropriate permissions).
If you want to find out what's already been published in Self-Service Analytics
One of the fundamental ideas behind Self-Service Analytics is to provide a repository that anyone in your organization can use to find published documents. But this is not much help if you cannot find what you are looking for. There are a number of simple ways that any user can find out what's been published on Self-Service Analytics:- Look at the Self-Service Analytics sitemap
- See what's been displayed on the front page
- See what's been recently published
- Search for some text
If you want to add your own documents to Self-Service Analytics
The flip side of using Self-Service Analytics as a knowledge repository is that it should be easy for anyone to add documents. Self-Service Analytics supports a number of different content types, but in the first instance the two simplest types are Articles (which are like simple notes) and Uploaded documents (which could be any type of file from your PC). In both cases, Self-Service Analytics will ask you for some other information about your document — which is used to make the document easy to find and allow users to know whether they'd be interested in it.
Another key idea is organization of content within Folders — providing some structure to Self-Service Analytics. When publishing new documents you will need to identify where you want to place the content within the overall folder structure. Browsing these folders is done through a folding tree like display — which hides and uncovers contents as required.
So in summary, to add your own document to Self-Service Analytics:
- Browse to the folder location for the document.
- Click on the 'add' tab.
- Choose which type of document you want to publish — the simple ones are Article and 'Upload Document'.
- Complete the document title and other required details to publish this.
If you want to analyze some demonstration data
Self-Service Analytics is not just another collection of documents for your organization (not just another intranet) — you can do some real exploratory analysis of data through it. In particular you can create new ad-hoc reports on data using any field and any measure (or summary value) as well as drill-down to individual customer records to understand what's going on at the customer level.
For you to make use of these capabilities, you will need to find a published dataset (there is one available in each of the project examples: Projects > Telco2000: Telco churn > Churn project analysis dataset and Projects > DirectBankUSA: Finance > Current analysis dataset) but you will also need to log into Self-Service Analytics as a user with sufficient permissions to run this analysis.
The simplest way to create ad-hoc reports is to click on the field names within the sections of the dataset view. This will provide a simple profile of the selected fields.
Getting more sophisticated could involve creating a crosstabulation of more than one fields — that is seeing how the values break down across another dimension. This can again be done from the section, though this time, you should check the boxes beside the two or three fields you are interested in and then pressing .
If this does not satisfy you, you can generate any report you want within the section below the initial reports. Clicking on the section will allow you to select any measure to query on and any set of fields to breakdown by.
For more guidance on how to do this yourself — view a short finance or telecommunications demonstration.