Business intelligence vendors have been promising to extend the power of analytics to regular business users for years. But that promise has gone largely unfulfilled. While exact figures are difficult to come by, by most estimates BI usage rates within the enterprise stall out around 18 percent to 20 percent.

The result of legacy business intelligence applications is more often frustration than actionable insights.

The reasons for this lack of success are several, but follow a general lifecycle. First, traditional business intelligence applications require IT to pull together data models and cobble together various data sources behind the scenes before reports or dashboards get rolled out to end-users. Then, if the resulting reports don’t “answer” the questions users are looking for (as is often the case in such an asynchronous process), IT must make further changes to the underlying models, which takes yet more time. Finally, by the time reports and dashboards make it to end users, the data and analysis they provide are often outdated.

It’s actually a wonder business intelligence adoption rates even break single digits.

The only way to truly extend business intelligence and analytics to business users is to make business intelligence applications self-service. IT must be taken out of the equation as much as possible. I spoke with Mark Jackson, Manager of Business Intelligence and Management Reporting for Piedmont Healthcare, who put it this way:

You need the people with the boots on the ground [business users], living and breathing the problems, to have the ability to solve the problems they encounter. [That’s why] we work with the end users to help make them as good as they can be at working with the data to solve unique problems.

Training business users to make them proficient at manipulating data is definitely part of the equation, as Mark rightly points out. But the tools themselves must be more intuitive and include both analytic and data integration capabilities that business users can master with a little training. Users need to be able to merge data sets via drag-and-drop interfaces; create and experiment with different visualizations to uncover insights; easily collaborate and share visualizations with coworkers; and perform ad hoc, interactive queries via GUIs rather than needing to write code.

This doesn’t mean IT doesn’t have any role to play. Training users is one area where IT and BI teams can and should play a role, as they do at Piedmont Healthcare. IT should also manage data governance, security and privacy considerations. But the power of business intelligence applications must reside in the hands of business users if it is ever to gain mainstream adoption in the enterprise.

The good news for business users is that there are a number of relatively new vendors on the market that, unencumbered by legacy architectures and products, are providing just such capabilities. These include Tableau Software, QlikTech as well as Hadoop-focused vendors like Platfora and Datameer. But it’s very early days for these vendors, and the potential for this market to itself stall exists. The risks include risk-averse IT departments preventing business users from adopting these self-service business intelligence applications and instead clinging to BI shelfware from legacy vendors, as well as the potential for new vendors themselves to lose focus and add bloatware to their products to placate IT.

Let’s not let it happen. Power to the business user.

Editor’s Note: Join us this Thursday, October 17th at 3pm ET for a live CrowdChat to debate this hot topic, Analytics for All: Putting the Power of Analytics in the Hands of Business Users. The CrowdChat is one in a series leading up to theCUBE at #BigDataNYC event on October 29 and 30. Click here and sign in with your Twitter or LinkedIn account to join the conversation via the unique and highly engaging experience known as CrowdChat.