Panorama Business Intelligence

Meetings are a necessary yet tedious part of everyone’s work day. No one, myself included, enjoys spending hours on end in the board room only to later return to a backlog of 20 emails and a stack of paper 6-inches thick.

While meetings are the age-old collaboration practice of just about every company, they can also effectively bring productivity to a screeching halt. They take time away from many tasks in order to focus on just one.

Such issues were addressed in a terrific podcast I recently came across entitled Read This Before Our Next Meeting. The premise of the podcast is based on the book of the same name by Al Pittampalli. In short, both address how disruptive meetings have become to daily operations.

But it doesn’t necessarily have to be this way. We believe that, through business intelligence and synchronized employees, companies will have a better means for gathering ideas, while still getting work done efficiently. It’s my belief that all of this can be accomplished with the help of business intelligence 3.0.

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The recent Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2011, held in Los Angeles last week, was a huge event for us here at Panorama Software. In addition to celebrating and reaffirming our continued partnership with Microsoft, we hosted a session of our own and had the honor of presenting at two others (click here to view the presentation archive).

The conference gave us another chance to demonstrate the cutting edge of business intelligence technology – Panorama Necto – in the Microsoft Expo Hall Theater. The solution was front and center during our discussion session, where we outlined the benefits of social business intelligence and how it will factor into the future of making better decisions.

As guest speakers, we presented at two other sessions focused on how business intelligence can help small- and medium-sized businesses grow and the importance of a strong SQL Server offering for cloud-based business. At these events Panorama did what it does best – promote the benefits of business intelligence.

Discussions at the sessions ranged from how SMBs can leverage their business data to what’s in store next for Microsoft’s SQL Server and how it will affect the future of the cloud.

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A lot has been made of social business processes and applications this year. Companies are focusing on collaborative technologies to bring more employees together to complete projects more quickly and efficiently.

Social business intelligence has proven to be among the most popular of these solutions. The technology allows companies to pool ideas and thoughts from a wide range of employees. That, in turn, lends more value to business data as various perspectives are taken into consideration.

Still, some companies aren’t convinced about the benefits of social business technology and it’s return on investment, according to a recent ebizQ report. And that’s key for many as they continue to recover from the economic recession and try to stretch every dollar as far as they can. But, with a little research, skeptical companies may see that social business processes can help them do just that.

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Plenty of innovations have been introduced to the business intelligence market in recent years, but none, perhaps, have had an impact as great as social business intelligence. Playing off the benefits of collaboration, social BI adds value to reporting on company information by pooling thoughts and ideas from across an organization.

Traditionally, business intelligence has been a complex technology, and only a select few employees within a company possessed the necessary knowledge to use a platform. However, the introduction of social business intelligence has changed all that.

Though even now, social BI has been taken to another level with the introduction of Panorama Necto from BI solutions provider Panorama Software. The new solution takes the social aspect of collaborative analytics farther than any other product on the market.

Panorama Necto goes above and beyond anything else available in the market today by offering greater relevancy in BI reporting.

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The notion that everybody has an opinion couldn’t be truer than in the business world. Company employees from the C-level to entry level have thoughts, ideas and opinions on everything from daily meetings to long-term business direction.

According to a recent Forbes report, companies traditionally have struggled to take advantage of the thoughts floating around in their employees’ heads. Ideas were locked into individual memories, notes were buried on computer hard drives and opinions were misinterpreted at meetings.

Not sharing such information limits its distribution, even when not intended, according to Forbes.

“That lock-in of information access introduces one more point where valuable tacit information becomes inaccessible, if the notes are lost, erased from computers, or gone when the person leaves the organization,” Rawn Shah wrote for Forbes. “You may never know the possibility of value such insight can bring, by placing such boundaries.”
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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.

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Many companies strive to become “flat organization” where senior management is connected to employees, giving them the ability to act and react much faster in a much more agile way.

Wikipedia defines: Flat organization (known as horizontal organization) refers to an organizational structure with few or no levels of intervening management between staff and managers. The idea is that well-trained workers will be more productive when they are more directly involved in the decision making process, rather than closely supervised by many layers of management.

The flat organization model promotes employee involvement through a decentralized decision making process. By elevating the level of responsibility of baseline employees, and by eliminating layers of middle management, comments and feedback reach all personnel involved in decisions more quickly. Expected response to customer feedback can thus become more rapid. Since the interaction between workers is more frequent, this organizational structure generally depends upon a much more personal relationship between workers and managers. Hence the structure can be more time-consuming to build than a traditional bureaucratic/hierarchical model.

Unfortunately, the flat organization concept has had only limited success so far. The main reasons are that this structure is generally possible only in smaller organizations or individual units within larger organizations. When they reach a critical size, organizations can retain a streamlined structure but cannot keep a completely flat manager-to-staff relationship without impacting productivity. Certain financial responsibilities may also require a more conventional structure. Some theorize that flat organizations become more traditionally hierarchical when they begin to be geared towards productivity. So in other words, employees just don’t have that ability today to communicate directly with executives in an agile and direct way that will make the vision of a flat organization work.

Or should I say until now…

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