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Social Business Intelligence Q&A Session

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The use of Social and Collaborative Business Intelligence (BI) will
allow information to be directly linked to decisions made within the
organization.

Social Business Intelligence, a form of collaborative decision-making
(CDM) software, is a mash up of Business Intelligence, Web 2.0 and
social networking technologies.  It allows multiple people to co-
operate in making sense of a data set; leading to fast and accurate
fact-based decision-making.

Despite intense interest and projected growth rates, Gartner has noted
that Social BI and CDM technologies remain in their infancy.  Many
organisation decision-makers still only have limited ability to share
and discuss reporting and analytics.

So what are the crucial components for a true social BI Solution? One,
capable of facilitating pervasive, centralised sharing, discussion and
fact-based decision-making

And how can organizations position themselves to maximize its decision-
making capabilities?

We asked industry expert and Yellowfin CEO, Glen Rabie, to respond to
these crucial issues.

Q:  Ok, the term Collaborative Business Intelligence gets flung around
a lot – so what is it?

 A:  The term Collaborative BI encompasses and describes those shared
activities and processes that, when drawn together, enable a
collective decision to be made.

Collaborative BI, a type of CDM platform, is about harnessing and
applying the functions and features of social networking and Web 2.0
technologies to the enterprise, to enable a better CDM process,
leading to better, faster decision-making.

Social and Collaborative BI is helping organizational decision-makers
to more effectively and efficiently discuss, analyze and share
information to empower organizations to act.

Collaborative BI is about maximizing the effectiveness of data
analysis.  An effective Social and Collaborative BI module should
encourage all relevant BI users and business decision-makers, from
inside and outside an organization, to share ideas and information to
support better strategic decision-making based on the information
generated by data analysis

Q:  Why are companies finding it hard to achieve Collaborative
Business Intelligence?

A:  The great failing of traditional reporting products is that they
deliver technology rather than business oriented solutions.  They
ignore the business-oriented end-user and create barriers between non-
technical personnel and corporate data.

Collaborative technologies are beginning to address this problem,
changing the way business people interact with data, and with each
other in relation to that data.

However, the CDM software industry, despite projected growth rates,
remains highly immature.  Many BI solutions and modules that are
branded as ‘Social’ still have limited reach within organizations –
they’re too complex and do not facilitate widespread enterprise CDM
based on reporting and analytics.  Without that, Social BI will fail.

It seems that many BI tools, despite being branded as “social”, do not
actually enable collective decision-making and action.  They aren’t
actually collaborative.

Q:  What do you think is driving companies’ desire to add
collaborative features to their reporting and analytics environment?

A:  It’s quite simple.  Organizations want to achieve better ROI from
their BI rollouts.  They want to arrive at better decisions in shorter
timeframes.  The problem with many traditional BI projects is that,
despite large amounts of time and money being spent, poor business
decisions are still made.

Now what does that reflect?  In most cases, the right data is being
collected and analyzed correctly.  The problem is that the insight
isn’t being effectively shared, discussed and used to underpin
collective fact-based decision-making.  Social BI bridges the gap
between insight and action.

Social BI takes advantage of existing analysis and information,
ensuring that it is used to its fullest potential.

The widespread collaboration that Social BI technologies can
facilitate stimulates better, not just faster, decision-making across
all business departments.  It is the accuracy of decisions made and
actions taken from data analysis, that help an organization maintain
competitive advantage.  Accurate decisions, not just quick decisions,
help underpin strategic planning for continued future success.

Q:  What are the components that make up a collaborative decision-
making (CDM) solution?

A:  There are three crucial components that combine together to form a
complete CDM module.  These are the ability to: Discuss and overlay
knowledge on business data; Share knowledge and content; Collectively
decide the best course of action.

Most analytics-based decision-making occurs outside organizational BI
platforms, opening a gap between human insight and the business data
itself. Decision-making remains isolated from the data that should
drive and underpin it.

Using a single open-access forum integrated within the BI tool,
business decisions are able to be made alongside business data, to
ensure steadfast, fact-based decision-making.  The right people are
connected with the right data, supporting a culture of organization-
wide information sharing and data access. This breaks down
departmental knowledge silos, enabling faster, better and more
effective decision-making.

Users should also be able to embed reports and other contextual
information in threaded conversations, and add annotations, to further
explain patterns and trends in the data.  Integrating these social
networking capabilities into existing BI applications allows users to
undertake discussion, analysis and CDM in full-view of their data,
within a uniform environment.

Secondly, the value of information resides in its ability to be
shared. A Social BI module must support the ability to share data and
insights wherever they are required, and in a manner that suits
individual circumstance.  Users should be able to share content
internally, on the integrated CDM platform or on company networks,
such as intranet; or, outside company firewalls, on external networks
such as wiki’s or blogs – wherever it is needed.

Lastly, the usefulness of networking at the enterprise level rests on
the ability to reach appropriate and timely decisions. For Social BI
to be successful, it must include a mechanism for deciding action,
such as voting or polling, to help push conversation towards a
specific, measurable and desirable course of action.

Q:  How are organizations meant to establish an effective measure for
ROI regarding Social and Collaborative Business Intelligence?

A:  Social and Collaborative BI is the ROI.  Let me explain.

A BI solution is just an enabler in an organization. Without a
decision there is no ROI.  Of itself, it is not capable of delivering
a decision.

You can have the best BI solution in the world, but unless your users
actually use the solution, and make business decisions as a result of
the information provided, there’s no justifiable ROI.

Traditionally, the decision process occurred independently of the BI
solution. This posed a problem – BI solutions did not facilitate the
discussion or the decision process. That’s now changing.

With Social BI, we bring the discussion and the decision-making into
the BI environment. The application facilitates the process of
evaluating data and the actions to be taken as a result of that data
analysis.

Social BI directly supports goal-oriented collective decision-making.
Social BI allows users to make meaningful business decisions based on
the data analysis generated from their BI tool

Q:  What effect do you think including collaborative components will
have on organizational culture?

A:  By implementing CDM technology you are simultaneously initiating a
shift in organizational social patterns and protocols.

The success of collaborative technologies rely on organizational
acceptance of these technologies and the social media style mandate
that anyone should be able to share content and contribute to
discussion, anywhere and anytime.

To facilitate the cultural change needed to realize the benefits of
CDM software, organizations must create a business environment that
encourages open discussion, sharing, and collective decision-making
based on data analysis.  They can achieve this by implementing three
cultural enablers: Senior executives must lead the way and embrace
collaborative processes as routine best practice; An anti-hierarchical
organizational structure should be embraced to ensure all relevant
parties can participate equally; and the HR department should
incorporate relationship building modules into learning and
development programs.

If you fail to establish a corporate environment conducive to
collaboration, how will you achieve the best from your CDM software?
Effective CDM requires the right mindset, not just the right tools.

Q:  How do Yellowfin’s Social and Collaborative components differ from
offerings by other Business Intelligence vendors?

A:  No other BI vendor does it all – lets you share, discuss and
decide.  Others have some of the components, but not all.

Yellowfin is currently the only BI solution on the market that offers
a complete CDM module straight ‘out-of-the-box’.

The collaborative components within Yellowfin help organizations
spread fact-based decision-making throughout the enterprise.
Yellowfin creates a business environment that empowers all relevant
decision-makers with the ability to use the insight generated through
reporting and analytics accurately, maximizing its potential to
underpin better, faster decisions and support operational objectives.

Yellowfin’s Social BI components facilitate better, faster, less labor-
intensive organization-wide CDM. Yellowfin is making enterprise
collaboration easy.

www.yellowfinbi.com

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Social Business Intelligence Q&A Session Jan <janpelletier@yahoo.ca> - 2011-07-19 05:32 -0700

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