Being a BI professional has its own advantage, there are several things you can do or experiment with using your personal data.
One such experience for me is creating visualizations using personal finance data (like spending, savings etc). Even though Mint.com site already combining all personal finance accounts data and provides interesting visualizations. It's worth the effort to try on our own using any desktop BI tools (Tableau, Qlikview, MSTR etc). It helps us professionals to learn about the tool and also the same time you can also gain insights/identify habits using your personal data (provided data quality is good ;).
Here are some such examples I have come across which are very helpful.
1) How to explore Cause and effect like a Data Scientist (http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/02/how-to-explore-cause-and-effect-like-a-data-scientist/) : An interesting visualization attempt by author using his personal health related (diet, travel and weight) data, explaining how can we we use Visualization for doing Causal analysis.
2) Create your own LinkedIn Connection Maps (http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com/): Today I have come across this link in one of the Business Intelligence discussion forums. This site lets you to visualize your LinkedIn connections, which is very intuitive and insightful. Based on the different colors in the map, you can categorize and group your connections. Here is my LinkedIn Connection map:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/linkedin_inmaps/65a1089ddeefc46a0a9fa507712eaaf644a4fe464dce4b2cff2b645033edfb117e73b1999d7ab4adf9a5d92331b33da9140b1476fb3f365ae48cccc68d60e6ab/inmap.gif?timestamp=20140303
3) We can select and watch better movies tonight: Qlikview has this interesting demo based on the Movies data, you can find this in the link : http://us.demo.qlikview.com/detail.aspx?appName=Movies%20Database.qvw This demo has the list of movies based on rating/ director/year/ actor/ title. I just did the quick analysis of Alfred Hitchcock's movies; and I found Vertigo is the top rated movie directed by him. Definitely planning to watch this movie. (Note: Non Techie movie aficionado dont have to feel jealous, yes this link doesn't need any technical knowledge. That's the power of Self service BI! ;))
