The business intelligence (BI) industry is constantly changing. Former industry trends and features found on company wish lists have become current capabilities within most BI offerings. For instance, larger data sets can be stored, organizations can analyze data on the fly through in-memory analytics and solutions are becoming easier to interact with irrespective of company role. And all of this is becoming possible at lower price points to enable broader adoption. In the past, many of these features were considered nice-to-haves instead of general expectations. Now companies expect business intelligence to provide them with historical and predictive analytical capabilities, while enabling broader use across the organization by meeting the needs of varying skill sets. Adding social media to the mix leads to greater expectations existing in relation to intuitive interfaces and ease of use, regardless of comfort with technology.

All of this leads to a promise of easier and broader access to analytics that provide better overall business decision making, more process efficiencies, and greater cost management, with the goal of reaching a wider audience to address more varied business challenges. In addition, because of the merge of ease of use and broader analytics, business intelligence is starting to live up to its promise of being a valuable tool that organizations cannot do without. Practically speaking, what does this really mean? Are companies able to merge ease of use with advanced analytics to achieve what social BI promises?

Current Market Reality

The reality is that business intelligence is still growing in relation to its ability to deliver solutions that provide easy access to agile analytics regardless of company role. In terms of BI delivery, more solutions exist today that address the needs of the market as well as industry trends that tie in social networking functionality with a forward- looking approach to analytics. For instance, the BI landscape is filled with trends that encompass:

1. Data – big data, extreme data, large-scale data warehouses and appliances, etc.
   
   
2. Analytics – agile insights and data discovery based on big data storage and more complexity.
   
   
3. Self-serve – the ability to develop custom-made analytics and create broader autonomy due to overall flexibility and ease of use.

These trends lead to demands for:

1. Agile analytics that enable end user-driven access without query or time restrictions.
   
   
2. The ability to answer more complex business questions without adding to complexity of use.
   
   
3. Collaboration, interactivity, and content sharing across departments and within customer- or partner-facing portals.
   
   
4. “Intuitive” access to business intelligence – business intelligence for the masses.

Matching Trends to Use

The overlaps between trends and types of desired use point to the need for more interactive tools that combine complexity, data volumes and higher levels of interactivity. Although this sounds intuitive to some, the reality remains that many BI offerings provide high level features and a broad range of functionality to enable deep dives into business problems and performance, but do not provide intuitive interfaces that provide BI access to the masses. In addition, within current BI environments, upgrading or enabling social networking capabilities may not be the reality. This can leave companies wondering what options exist when looking at expanding their BI use.

For some organizations, collaboration involves integrating their BI solutions with SharePoint or providing broader access to customers or partners through online portals to enable broader visibility and transparency. For other companies, the goal is to share information across departments internally, allowing for broader participation in a variety of business-oriented projects. The level of true collaboration and social networking currently remains limited to the BI infrastructure within the organization and the corporate culture that will either provide support for broader collaborative infrastructures or create potential stumbling blocks.

Breaking Down Demands into Today’s Reality

When looking at BI use specifically, it’s important to identify how market demands are pushing the need for social BI and how organizations can push their use to the next level. This can be achieved through software adoption and/or changes within BI culture and overall BI use. The following takes identified market demands to the next level by looking at how they affect organizations and how vendor offerings are addressing their needs.

1. Agile analytics: The ability to access analytics on a broader scale based on cause and effect means that organizations are no longer stuck with pre-defined data marts and ad hoc reporting features. Now, business decision makers and technical users can access large data sets and perform complex queries on the fly without roadblocks associated with limitations in technology. Data warehousing vendors are taking advantage of Hadoop, MapReduce, more storage, data virtualization capabilities, etc., to provide more powerful data management options. The implications for organizations are positive. More storage, real-time data access, and broader analytics are just the starting points that expansions in agility and big data access provide.
   
   
2. Complexity: Larger data sets, acquisitions, integrating multiple disparate data sets, dynamic business challenges, etc., all lead to the increasing complexity being faced within organizations. Consequently, BI offerings are addressing this need through more agile access and the ability to identify data/information complexities and provide answers to more complicated issues while drilling into data more deeply. 
   
   
3. Collaboration: Sharing information across the organization and with suppliers, partners, and customers, and using collaborative technologies to move through project tasks are becoming more important aspects within a BI environment. There are some vendors that provide these features, but most are still limited when looking at specific collaboration and what it should entail. In some cases, organizations can use different technologies to integrate collaboration within their BI environments. Newer entrants to the market are developing solutions with strong collaboration capabilities, but may lack in other areas. Due to social networking capabilities, the importance of collaboration will continue to increase – hopefully, BI providers will be able to meet the demands of BI users and develop more advanced collaborative feature sets.
   
   
4.  “Intuitive” access: All of this leads to the concept of self-service business intelligence and empowering business users through interactive analytics and BI access. What this really means within the market differs to the various solution providers. Many offerings promise self-service capabilities, but few are intuitive without training or  knowledge of how various data sources interrelate. The solutions that do address these needs are still new and have not attracted broad adoption levels at this point.

What About Social BI?

How do all of these trends and demands relate to social business intelligence? The reality is that offerings that provide all of these functions do exist. Organizations can take advantage of social business intelligence to drive adoption and interaction to the next level. The problem is that these solutions are relatively unknown within the larger marketplace, and traditional BI vendors are still slow at transitioning toward a self-service and social networking conscious solution. Luckily, the continuing adoption of social networking within organizations and mobile access to business applications will continue to drive the focus on social BI interactions and broader ease of use.

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