Social Business Intelligence: The Next Big Thing!
Social networks and social media are ubiquitous! Every aspect of modern life (personal and business) involves sharing and social interaction, whether one is broadcasting information about a recent family event, posting a picture, asking opinions at work or promoting a new product or event.
In the old days, team members and employees shared and discussed information at the water cooler or in the cafeteria. Content Management Systems (CMS) and online meeting software furthered collaboration and sharing and helped business users to come together to review and edit documents and work on projects. And, so it is no surprise that today’s business users expect the same sort of capacity for sharing and collaboration in a business intelligence tool.
Dry reporting and restrictive dashboards no longer serve the purpose of the organization or its users. Driven by the increasing demand for self-serve BI tools and shared resources and knowledge, business intelligence must now support applications of social networking and social media if it is to remain relevant and continue to contribute value to users and enterprises.
The advent of tools like self-serve data preparation, plug n’ play predictive analysis and smart data visualization provide support for business users to leverage sophisticated tools and algorithms in an easy-to-use environment and improve data agility and timeliness. Business users can apply their own domain and role-specific knowledge and skill to data analytics, the availability and access to solid data and creative, concise reporting and data sharing will result in improved user adoption and the emergence of ‘popular’ Citizen Data Scientists and reporting techniques and data presentation.
Users can rate a particular data source, or a particular report or dashboard. Data agility and accessibility is not the same thing as 100% high-quality data produced by analysts or IT resources but for many business applications, self-serve data preparation is just what is needed to achieve good, solid information and perform analysis to make good decisions.
