Social media and BI are converging. Due to the increasing use of social media and the ease of use with which people interact with technology, many business users want to achieve the same levels of interactivity inside the organization. Unfortunately, within the realm of BI this has remained limited. Yes, a few vendors have developed their platform based on collaboration, ease of use, easy access to data, and high levels of interactivity. But, for the most part, organizations are hard pressed to find solutions that provide social media-like features within their BI platforms.
Luckily, vendors are continuously working to improve their offerings to their customers in hopes of expanding their solutions to provide broader access to business intelligence. Within the next few years, vendors will continue to expand these offerings to provide true collaborative capabilities as part of their larger BI offerings.
Until that point, organizations should identify the level of social networking interaction they require within their BI applications:
- How important is collaboration and to what level? How do disparate business units communicate and share information?
- What type of information is required? And how much data analysis should be pre-defined versus ad-hoc?
- Who will be using the BI solution and what is their comfort level with technology?
- What is the overall goal of BI within the organization?
The list of questions are endless, but the fact remains - businesses are looking to expand their BI value through social networking features and functionality to empower business users and increase business visibility.
On another note, the WiseAnalytics community targeted to SMBs has launched. Visit at http://wiseanalytics.com/community/forum.php
Posted November 10, 2011 6:34 AM
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