Fri 5 Jun 2009
Harnessing the Power of Social Media to Expand the Reach of BI
Posted by Oudi Antebi under Social Media & BI , The Future of BI[4] Comments
Social media has fired the first shots of an information revolution. MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn have changed the way we network, while tools like Twitter and Yammer have introduced the roles of “content creators” and “followers.”
The rate at which information consumption has evolved is really astounding. This April alone, Twitter estimated more than 17 million unique US visitors. The same month, Facebook reported 200 million active users – only three months after reaching the 150 million mark. Factoring in blogs, wikis, podcasts and other social media outlets, the amount of businesses and consumers that companies are actively engaging is through the roof.
The emergence of social media has laid the groundwork for anyone to publish thoughts, ideas and information and share that content instantaneously with the rest of the web. Because social media is inherently simple to manipulate, it is quickly becoming the preferred way to consume information.
We’ve already begun using these platforms for marketing, networking, content sharing and a wealth of other purposes. In a world where Business Intelligence tools are still used primarily by few power users in the organization, it seems that extending the reach of insights through social media is the right way to go.
If every power user that uses BI could share the insights he found during the process of data analysis with the masses in the organization through tools such as Yammer and twitter, more information workers would be able to use those insights in their daily jobs.
Today BI vendors try to get to the masses by trying to find ways for more people to use these specialized tools as opposed to trying to integrate between 2 different technologies (BI tools and social media) to reach the anticipated goal faster.
So may be all you need to reach the masses is combine BI with social media? Would love to hear your thoughts!
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June 11th, 2009 at 9:16 am
I agree with you that traditional BI tools won’t cut it for everyone. Being successful means understanding the end-user and how they need their BI delivered.
However, current social media like Twitter or Yammer seems to have too short a life span to become true a business intelligence tool. By itself it is somewhat limited but combined with other social and collaboration tools I am sure it will evolve into something that works very well.
I say that because simply blasting a tweet to the organization about a snippet of insight we have gained is not as powerful as being able to start a dialog and collaborate on that insight. If I just completed some analysis and noticed the start of a trend in our sales revenue I need to be able to do more than just get the word out. I need to be starting a “thread” where we can keep an eye on this trend and continue to monitor it. This way, if in fact continues to have a positive impact on our revenue, we can refer back to the analysis I did, remind ourselves of the root cause and work it into our operational plan.
A tool like Google Wave (http://wave.google.com/) seems like it has the potential to offer us this level of collaborative intelligence. Mostly because it combines so many facets of social and electronic media into one platform.
June 17th, 2009 at 3:19 am
I agree completely with Adam
I think that social media like twitter only delivers half of what is needed. Google Wave has definitely got much more potential to take BI to the masses via collaborative intelligence.
It would be great to see some tools that take advantage of the Google Wave protocol to distribute the insights driven from an organizations BI strategy.
One big question remains, would a company be willing to broadcast their sensitive information via a Wave?
June 17th, 2009 at 1:37 pm
I believe that Twitter and the ilk are a potentially very dangerous tool in the workplace, as they allow broadcast without context. There are already communication issues with email being taken out of context restricting the message further in Twitter can only increase this risk. I too see google wave as a paradigm shift rather than Twitter but, We have to face the fact that often business is complex and expecting a tool or delivery medium to simplify this for us is not going to happen. We need to have cultural change that encourages questioning and a desire to master complexity not a desire to pass responibility for comprehension to a tool or communication method.
June 18th, 2009 at 12:59 am
I agree with Tony completely. What we need in organizations is a desire to question and master complexity in every employee. If organizations can use their BI tools to encourage their employees to do that it will be the true information revolution that they can bring in