As self-serve business intelligence and data analytics has evolved, the concept of Social BI and business intelligence collaboration has become more prominent. Today’s trends in social networking and collaboration drive Social BI within the organization and, as this concept becomes more mainstream, business users and organizations reap the benefits of these collaborative efforts and of shared data analytics and data popularity.
Social BI encompasses the gathering, analysis, publishing, and sharing of data, reports and information using interactive business intelligence and analytics dashboards and intuitive tools to improve data clarity, and user understanding and comfort with analytical tools. Social BI enables confident decisions and puts all users on the same page so that activities, tasks and goals are driven by a shared understanding and use of analytical tools and results. Perhaps the most crucial aspect of Social BI lies in the power of its self-serve, user-generated analysis and the application of business user knowledge and skill to generate and share reports and data without the assistance of data scientists or IT staff.
Social Business Intelligence encourages data sharing and analysis across teams, divisions and business units to increase and improve results in product development, projects, business processes, quality control, etc.
How Can Social BI Enable Business Success?
Imagine an environment where business users can access a Business Intelligence and analysis portal and see popular data to rate, share and comment. This type of sharing can optimize resources by allowing users to access reports, dashboards and data that might be just what they need to complete a task or analysis. When you implement social media and social networking within the Business Intelligence environment business users can share, rate, discuss and learn from others.
As Social BI cascades throughout the organization, the business can nurture power users who take a creative, insightful approach to data analysis. Just as social media users can ‘Like’ or ‘Share’ a provocative post from another user, a social business intelligence tool can support the same kind of collaboration, sharing and learning within your organization. As power users emerge and data sharing becomes more common, the average business user will develop a better understanding of analytics and become more comfortable with these techniques, and the organization will see improved user adoption of BI tools.
The Social BI trend also allows the organization to understand the types of data that users value, and how to provide, and present, data to improve data leverage, and increase confidence in decisions. Understanding the social aspect of data analysis, and data popularity allows the enterprise to make decisions about additional provisioning of data, reports and dashboards to business users.
Social Business Intelligence Tool creates ‘popular’ business users and content, encourages collaboration, and reveals what data and content is valued by users.
Popularity is not the measure of quality but rather a measure of business value, providing insight for IT and BI teams to standardize data and content and provide high quality, certified, curated data to users.
Business users can share, rate, discuss and learn from other users and, if they don’t have to reinvent a report, they can optimize their time.
Social Business Intelligence Software promotes collaborative decision-making among business users, drives BI tool user adoption, and allows the organization to share resources and knowledge.
Original Post: What is Social BI and How Can it Enable Business Success?
