A common situation unfolds when a product manager needs churn insights to guide an upcoming launch. The dashboards? Useless. So they submit a request to the data team. Days later, a dataset arrives with confusing field names and little documentation. After several rounds of clarification, the report is finally usable, but the decision has already been made without it.
For many organizations, this remains the reality. Reports and dashboards pile up in request queues, creating bottlenecks that delay critical decisions. Analysts waste hours duplicating work that’s already been done elsewhere, while executives are left comparing conflicting versions of the truth. These inefficiencies erode confidence in analytics and slow the pace of decision-making.
The Cost of Analytics Bottlenecks
A Forrester survey found that 61% of organizations use four or more analytics platforms, and 25% use ten or more. This fragmentation often leads to duplicated reporting, siloed insights, and a growing struggle to find reliable data. Supporting research from Cottrill Research shows that knowledge workers spend about 2.5 hours each day, or nearly 30% of their time, searching for information.
These numbers reflect real, everyday frustrations. Marketing teams often build separate dashboards for the same campaign metrics. Finance and operations rely on conflicting versions of sales data. Storage systems overflow with outdated reports that no one decommissions. Instead of enabling agility, traditional reporting processes slow teams down and let opportunities slip away.
Self-service analytics catalog offers a way out of this cycle. With a centralized analytics catalog providing governed access to trusted data and reports, business units no longer depend on IT for every answer. Self-service discovery of reports leverages existing assets, reducing the need to contact IT for a new report. New reports and dashboards, if needed, can be customized from existing assets without taking days to develop. The result: bottlenecks disappear, decisions accelerate, and insights reach the people who need them, when they need them.
Empowering Business Users to Make Data-Driven Decisions
Self-service analytics democratizes data by putting it directly in the hands of employees. Instead of relying on specialized teams to retrieve or process information, users can search a catalog of curated datasets and reports, confident that the data is both accurate and reliable. Adoption has increased by 87%, as more employees are empowered to incorporate data into their daily decision-making.
This increased autonomy transforms how business units operate. Decisions can be made on demand, backed by real-time insights. Teams are encouraged to take ownership of their data, promoting a culture of accountability and agility. When access is simplified, analytics becomes a natural part of everyday workflows rather than a specialized task reserved for a select few.
Benefits of Self-Service Analytics Catalog for Business Units
Custom Reports and Dashboards in Analytics Catalogs
An analytics catalog acts as a centralized library for datasets, reports, and dashboards. Instead of creating multiple variations of the same report, employees can search existing assets, reuse them, and customize dashboards to their specific needs. The approach ensures consistency in data definitions and calculations while minimizing duplication and inefficiencies. It also encourages cross-departmental collaboration by enabling teams to share insights, build on each other’s work, and stay aligned through a single, trusted source of analytic assets.
Brown-Forman, a global beverage company, illustrates the impact of using ZenOptics to simplify access to custom reports and dashboards. Before implementation, employees often struggled to determine which tool contained the data they needed, leading to duplicate reports and wasted effort.
With ZenOptics providing a single point of access, the company achieved measurable results:
- 25% increase in users
- 27% rise in report access
- 30% reduction in total reports
These gains also gave employees greater confidence in the reliability of the data they were using for decision-making.
Boosting Productivity and Reducing IT Dependency
Routine reporting tasks often consume a large portion of IT and data teams’ time, limiting their capacity to focus on strategic initiatives. Self-service analytics catalog shifts this workload to employees across departments, empowering IT to concentrate on governance, data quality, and advanced analytics.
Consider healthcare, where clinical analysts and administrative staff often need access to medical records, claims data, patient registries, and scheduling information spread across different systems. In a traditional setup, these requests pass through IT, which slows down daily operations and creates information silos.
With a self-service analytics catalog, enterprise analytic assets such as reports, dashboards, and visualizations are easily discoverable. Analysts and non-technical staff, such as hospital administrators, can retrieve the information they need independently and adjust resources in real time. Such accessibility reduces the reporting burden on IT and ensures faster, more reliable decision-making across the organization.
The result: a more agile and productive workplace. Data teams spend less time handling repetitive requests, while employees of all skill levels operate with greater speed, autonomy, and confidence.
Strengthening Data Governance with Self-Service Analytics Catalog
Self-service analytics catalog doesn’t mean sacrificing control. Through centralized catalogs, organizations can enforce consistent definitions, standardized calculations, and clear access policies. This governance framework ensures that while users gain more freedom to discover and access reports, compliance remains protected.
Janney, a financial services firm, demonstrates how self-service analytics can strengthen governance when paired with ZenOptics. Before adoption, analysts spent significant time resolving conflicting report versions and managing compliance risks caused by duplicate assets.
To create clarity, Janney developed a consolidated BI Glossary that standardized terminology and metric methodologies across departments. This resource helps users understand how attributes and metrics are defined and shows which reports rely on those elements.
With ZenOptics providing a single point of access, Janney reduced duplication and ensured users worked from consistent, trusted data. Combined with the BI Glossary, these efforts improved governance, enhanced transparency, and gave employees greater confidence in the accuracy of analytics for decision-making.
Empower Your Business with ZenOptics
Organizations that want to stay agile and competitive must rethink how employees access and use data. Self-service analytics catalog is a proven strategy to eliminate bottlenecks and enable faster insights.
Take the next step toward empowering your teams with trustworthy and accessible data. Explore how ZenOptics can help streamline reporting, consolidate analytic assets, and build confidence in decision-making across your enterprise.
Schedule a demo today and see the difference.
Published September 12, 2025