Can a user really do BI from the desktop?

Analysts at Gartner (and Forrester, and elsewhere) have predicted that 2011 will be the year of self service business intelligence, as users demand tools to help them access and understand company data.

The users’ motives are easy to understand: identifying and responding quickly to trends and patterns in business data is vital, especially when the margins are narrow. The faster the reports can be produced, the better, and the lesser the load on IT. But is this really happening?

Now that spreadsheets can handle increasingly large datasets, Can a user really do BI from the desktop? If you have some thoughts, please share them in the comments. If you don’t have any ideas, perhaps you’ll vote for the comments you think are best.

We’ll be in touch with the “winner” to get a more in depth view. Think you can help? Well, what are you waiting for?