Businesses can no longer afford IT to be a bottleneck in delivering authoritative and trustworthy information to the business.  The business needs to be empowered to do more on their own through self-service.  Self-service is the approach retail companies took years ago to eliminate wait times, reduce resource costs, and improve customer satisfaction.   Consumers use self-service gas stations to pump their own gas, self-service checkout aisles to pay for groceries, self-service web sites to book travel, and more recently self-service using mobile devices to find the nearest restaurant or purchase tickets for a movie.  Yet, businesses are still forced to wait months to access valuable information. And that wait often costs the business more than all of IT combined. (more…)