Self-serve business intelligence empowers business users to access and analyze data without support from data teams and without writing code. Many organizations attempt to offer self-serve BI, but struggle with data bottlenecks, data governance issues, and complex BI tools that cause business users to export data to spreadsheets.
Row Zero is an enterprise-grade spreadsheet that works like Excel and Google Sheets but has the big data power, connectivity, and security of modern BI tools. In this guide, we'll offer 5 keys to establishing good self-serve business intelligence and show how Row Zero plays a critical role in successful self-serve BI programs.
- What is self-serve business intelligence?
- 5 keys to self-serve business intelligence
- Goals of self-serve business intelligence
- Challenges of self-serve BI
- Self-serve BI vs traditional BI tools
- Best self-serve BI tools
- AI and self-serve BI
What is self-serve business intelligence?
Self-serve business intelligence is a set of tools and processes that allow non-technical business users to access, analyze, and visualize data on their own — without help from data teams and without writing code. Self-serve BI enables users to quickly and independently answer questions and solve problems and is critical to establishing a high-performing, data-driven culture.
5 keys to self-serve business intelligence
Many BI tools claim to be self-serve, but fall short in practice. As a result, organizations struggle to establish good self-serve business intelligence programs and are stuck in an endless cycle of expensive BI tools that are underutilized, and big data teams that are overburdened with requests. Here are 5 keys to good self-serve BI and how Row Zero makes them possible:
- Users know how to use the tool and actually use it
- Users can easily access the data they need
- The tool can handle the data they need
- Data is secure, despite self-serve usage
- The tool is universally self-serve - teams can collaborative and share
Below we'll explore each of these concepts.
1. Users know how to use the tool and actually use it
This is pretty straightforward. If users can't easily use the tool, then it's not self-serve. Many BI tools fail to pass this fundamental test and are underutilized. Rather than use the BI tool to analyze data, business users often export to CSV to analyze in Excel or Google Sheets, which creates security and data governance issues and is inefficient and static.
How Row Zero solves this
Row Zero is an enterprise-grade spreadsheet that works like Excel and Google Sheets but has the big data power, connectivity, and security of modern BI tools. Business users get a spreadsheet they know how to use that is 1000x more powerful, connected, and auto-updating.
2. Users can easily access the data they need
Easy access to data is core to self-serve business intelligence. Users need to be able to quickly and easily access the data they need without putting in a request to a data team. Ideally, users have real-time access to secure, governed data and the analysis they build auto-updates. In many BI tools it's a challenge to access, view, and analyze raw data.
How Row Zero solves this
Row Zero has built-in connectors to data sources (Snowflake, Databricks, Postgres, S3, etc.), so users can easily access the latest data and build connected spreadsheet that auto-update. Data teams can create shared data sources which give non-technical users one-click access to updating, governed data. 
Row Zero's big data power lets users access entire data tables so they can explore raw data to solve problems and find opportunities - even if they can't initially articulate what they're looking for. Row Zero also inherits row level security from the data warehouse, so users only see the data they are supposed to see.
And if files are a part of your team's workflows, you can easily open big CSV files, parquet files, .txt, JSONL, .gz, etc., clean them up, and write-back directly to your data warehouse.
3. The tool can handle the data they need
Most business users prefer to work in spreadsheets, but legacy spreadsheets like Excel and Google Sheets have data limits and many BI tools are slow with big data and can't import large file formats like parquet, JSONL, and CSV.gz files. This leads to workarounds, splitting files, and requests for data team support.
How Row Zero solves this
Row Zero supports billion row spreadsheets (1000x Excel's limits) on Enterprise plans, so business users can easily work with big data in a spreadsheet. Row Zero's highly performant spreadsheet engine leverages scalable cloud infrastructure and is significantly faster than Excel or BI tools for working with big data.
4. Data is secure despite self-serve usage
Self-serve means users can access, explore, and analyze data. If not set up correctly, data and business intelligence tools can increase data security risks since they expand access to sensitive customer data. As a general rule of thumb, if users can export to CSV anywhere in your tech stack (e.g. Salesforce, Tableau, Quickbooks, etc.), then you likely have inadequate data governance. Without proactive security measures, typical spreadsheet usage can be a security risk.
How Row Zero solves this
Row Zero is specifically designed for self-service security. Organizations can restrict data export, sharing, and copy/paste. Data never leaves the cloud and is region locked. Enterprises can set up single sign-on (SSO) and OAuth connections to data sources so users can only access data with a secure company login. And workbooks inherit row level security from the data warehouse. Row Zero is HIPAA and SOC 2 compliant. View 10 ways Row Zero improves data governance.
5. Universally self-serve - teams collaborate and share
Good self-serve business intelligence is universally self-serve. Teams can collaborate and share insights across technical levels. When analysis is shared, anyone else is able to pick up the tool and start running and there is universally little or no learning curve for any user to get started.
How Row Zero solves this
Spreadsheets are the universal self-serve analytics tool and Row Zero works like other spreadsheets. If you know how to use Excel or Google Sheets, you already know how to use it. Row Zero's built-in spreadsheet functions use the same syntax as Excel and Sheets. Users can use the same keyboard shortcuts, create pivot tables, build charts, etc. Row Zero also supports real-time collaboration and sharing.
Goals of self-serve business intelligence
The goals of self-serve BI platforms are to:
- Speed up decision-making - Empower teams with the data they need to make decisions in real-time.
- Increase data access - Make data accessible across departments so non-technical teams like finance, marketing, sales, and ops can easily access the data they need.
- Reduce data bottlenecks - Reduce or eliminate ad hoc data requests and data bottlenecks which can slow decisions.
- Improve efficiency - Make data analysis fast and automate reports, dashboards, and workflows so teams can operate efficiently.
- Foster a data-driven culture - Make data insights a core part of the business process instead of just pre-built, periodic reporting.
- Keep data secure - Ensure good data governance and security, even as data access expands and analysis is decentralized
A good self-serve data intelligence platform creates a data-driven culture that is efficient, collaborative, and secure.
Challenges of self-serve BI
Many companies struggle to establish a good self-serve intelligence ecosystem. The costs of poor business intelligence programs are high - companies buy expensive tools and build out large data teams, but business users struggle to get the data they need to run their business, everything slows down, and security risks abound. Here are key challenges to look out for:
- Many users and use cases - Different users and teams have different needs, different skill levels, and sometimes different data sources, which can make it a challenge to find a universal self-serve solution. While wider data access has many positives, lack of context and/or data literacy can lead to false insights.
- Data governance - It's important to ensure people don’t access the wrong data or draw incorrect conclusions. As data access increases, it's increasingly important to keep data secure, compliant, and consistent across the org. Many business users will want to export CSVs from BI tools and SaaS tools to open in spreadsheets, so it's important to proactively incorporate spreadsheets into your BI data governance program to avoid this security risk.
- BI tool complexity - It can be a challenge to find a self-serve BI tool that is usable for non-technical folks. Most BI tools are too complex for non-technical users to build anything. Business users typically want to work with data in spreadsheets and will often use a BI tool to export to CSV to work in a spreadsheet. That's why a BI spreadsheet like Row Zero is so powerful. Users get the power of a big BI tool in the comfort of a spreadsheet they already know how to use.
- Performance and scale - Business intelligence tools are often used to analyze large data sets. If infrastructure isn't optimized, BI tools can be very slow. Spreadsheets like Excel and Google Sheets will crash or slow down with big data.
- High total cost - Many BI tools are expensive on a per user basis and also push compute down to the data warehouse which can increase data warehouse costs if not optimized correctly.
- Versioning / metric drift - Without central logic like semantic layers and governed metrics, teams may define KPIs differently. This problem is exacerbated if data is sourced from many sources.
- Integration complexity - At most companies, data is in many sources and teams may struggle to combine data across systems (CRM, billing, product analytics, etc.).
While these challenges are meaningful, they are often greatly outweighed by the costs of not building out a self-serve analytics ecosystem.
Self-serve BI vs traditional BI
Self-serve BI and traditional BI differ fundamentally in who accesses the data, how fast insights are delivered, and how flexible the system is. Below is a breakdown of key differences between self-serve BI and traditional BI.
Key Differences: Self-Serve BI vs Traditional BI
Who creates reports?
- Traditional BI: BI teams, data analysts, IT
- Self-serve BI: Anyone - business users, product teams, non-technical analysts, etc.
Typical use case
- Traditional BI: Pre-built reports and company dashboards where users are not expected to explore the data on their own
- Self-serve BI: Daily operations, exploratory analysis, ad hoc problem solving
Speed of access
- Traditional BI: Slow – requires requests to be queued and fulfilled
- Self-serve BI: Fast – users explore data instantly
Flexibility
- Traditional BI: Rigid – fixed dashboards and pre-built reports. Follow up questions and ad hoc reporting is hard
- Self-serve BI: Flexible – users build their own views, filters, and charts and can quickly solve problems and do ad hoc analysis
Data query method
- Traditional BI: Often requires SQL, scripts, or tool-specific languages
- Self-serve BI: Simple report builders and one-click data access with built-in filter, sort, calculations, and transformations so users don't have to write SQL, python, or R
Data governance
- Traditional BI: Centralized and highly controlled
- Self-serve BI: User-specific access controls and export restrictions
Costs
- Traditional BI: High – due to expensive tools, large data teams, and inefficient processes
- Self-serve BI: Lower – more scalable per user, with less dedicated resources
Example of self-serve BI vs traditional BI
- Traditional BI: A sales leader requests a monthly pipeline report → data team pulls SQL → builds a dashboard → sends it 3 days later.
- Self-Serve BI: The same sales leader opens a connected, updating spreadsheet of all sale opportunities and creates a pivot table of pipeline by stage and projected close date.
Best self-serve BI tools
The best self-serve business intelligence tools tend to fall into two buckets:
- Spreadsheets
- No code BI tools
1. Spreadsheets
Spreadsheets have gotten a big upgrade in the last few years. BI spreadsheets like Row Zero offer big data power, data connectivity, and enterprise-grade security. Legacy spreadsheets like Excel and Google Sheets now have robust add-ons for data connectors and built-in artificial intelligence features. Spreadsheets are the most universally accessible tool and are highly flexible across use cases, so they are a good choice for self-serve business intelligence.
Key considerations for spreadsheets as BI tools
- Connected spreadsheets - It's critical to connect spreadsheets directly to your data sources to make it easy to access and update data in the spreadsheet. Row Zero has built-in connectors to popular data sources.Excel and Google Sheets add-ons exist for specific sources (e.g. Databricks connector for Google Sheets) and there are also add-ons like Coefficient and Coupler that connect to many data sources (e.g. Salesforce, Hubspot, Quickbooks, etc.). Read our review of Coefficient and alternatives.
- Big data performance - If your teams work with large datasets you'll want to use Row Zero, which is built for big data analysis. Row Zero supports 1000x bigger spreadsheets than legacy tools and is much faster than Excel and Google Sheets for big data.
- Security and data governance - If not proactively managed, traditional spreadsheet usage can lead to data governance issues and data leakage. If security is a priority, use Row Zero. Row Zero is specifically built for self-service security and offers enterprise security features including SSO, OAuth data connectors, and the ability to restrict data export, sharing, and copy/paste. Spreadsheets can inherit row level security from the data warehouse for each user.
2. No code BI tools
There are several no code business intelligence tools specifically built for self-serve usage and most BI tools now offer no or low code features for non-technical users. Here are a few to consider:
- Metabase is a free self-serve data analysis tool that is open-source.
- Sigma is a collaborative data workspace with a spreadsheet-like UI that connects to data warehouses. Here's a review of Sigma features.
- Power BI - Of the major traditional BI tools (Power BI, Tableau, Looker), Power BI is the most widely used and accessible.
- Qlik has a self-service business intelligence tool that integrates with multiple data sources.
- Rows is a re-imagined spreadsheet experience with BI tool features. Here's a review of Rows features.
While these no code BI tools are focused on self-service business intelligence, they still have a learning curve and don't replace spreadsheets in the modern data stack so they are often used in tandem with spreadsheets.
AI and self-serve business intelligence
Artificial intelligence has significant potential to improve self-serve business intelligence. Many BI tools are incorporating AI features that let users analyze data with natural language prompts and similarly create charts and pivot tables with AI. This has the potential to transform how both technical and non-technical users work with data and how data drives decisions. It may also widen the gap between more tech savvy users that can best take advantage of AI vs less tech savvy users. As AI business intelligence evolves, companies should proactively train employees on how to best leverage AI for business analysis and how to scrutinize AI-driven business intelligence to avoid errors and incorrect insights.
Conclusion
Many companies struggle to establish a good self-serve intelligence ecosystem and struggle with underutilized expensive tools, overwhelmed data teams, and security risks. Despite the challenges, the benefits of good business intelligence programs are very impactful - teams are leaner, faster, and more efficient, data drives decisions, and data is governed and secure. Good self-serve BI can be significantly lower cost and more effective than traditional business intelligence. Row Zero is an enterprise-grade spreadsheet that connects directly to your data warehouse so you can give business users secure access to the data warehouses in a spreadsheet tool they already know how to use. For companies with big data and security scrutiny, Row Zero is the best self-service business intelligence tool.