Everyone over the age of five knows about social networks and social media. No matter which platform you prefer and how you choose to share your thoughts and ideas, you are no doubt engaged in the networking world. When it comes to business intelligence and analytics, there is no reason you can’t employ the same techniques to share, collaborate, create and innovate.
Every business has heard and read about business intelligence and the benefits of building a base of intelligence from which to drive your business results and make fact-based decisions. One of the benefits that is often overlooked is the aspect of Social BI. When a business chooses a BI tool that encourages social BI, it further promotes user adoption, data democratization and data literacy. As business users embrace and share data, their level of proficiency and comfort will increase and the business can achieve the results it hopes for and improve productivity, collaboration and the use of data within the organization.
When a business is looking for a business intelligence vendor, business managers will often look to a Gartner Magic Quadrant Report for a comparison of BI Tools. There are numerous choices listed in Self-Service BI Gartner reports and it may be difficult to determine which is best for your business.
If you stay up-to-date with your industry and market publications, you have probably heard a lot of buzz about natural language processing or NLP. In fact, whether you know it or not, you use NLP every day. When you type a question into Google, you are using NLP! The system translates your question and returns results to meet your needs.
If you are looking for a business intelligence solution, be sure to consider the Mobile BI factor. Mobile business intelligence is a necessity in today’s business environment. With so many users working from home, on the road or working after hours, it is critical to provide users with real time BI tools that can be used on any type of smart phone, tablet, laptop or desktop with seamless resolution and performance.
If your team is using business intelligence (and it should be), you may be working with a more restrictive business solution that is not designed for a business user. If that is the case, you are missing an opportunity to cascade analytics throughout the organization and to optimize your resources and improve productivity. Self-Serve Business Intelligence solutions are designed with guidance and recommendations to guide a business user with average skills through the process of preparing and analyzing data and to encourage collaboration and data sharing across the enterprise.
There are many reasons for a business to consider a self-serve business intelligence solution for business users. If properly deployed, BI tools improve productivity, accuracy and speed of decisions and competitive advantage – among other things.
If you are thinking that business analytics is too complex for you (or your business users), you may want to take a step back and look at the exciting evolution of business analytics tools. Today’s business intelligence solutions and business analytics software offer easy-to-use tools and features that are suitable for business users at every skill level.
What exactly is social business intelligence? The concept of Social BI is really quite simple. Social BI is similar to social media and social networking, in that it embraces the tasks associated with data analytics and makes these tasks and the resulting data insight a social experience by providing tools and an environment that encourages business users and team members to share data, make fact-based decisions based on that data and learn from each other to help each user adopt and leverage analytics. Power users are the ‘influencers’ of social BI and they can influence data popularity, the types of reports and data sharing within the organization and the creative ways in which people use data.
If your business is planning to implement self service business intelligence, you may be focused on cascading data analysis and fact-based decision-making throughout the enterprise and, hopefully, your focus includes improving the data literacy of your business users and team members.
