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.

With next-generation business intelligence, we envision companies spending less time talking about what needs to be done and more time actually putting decisions into action. Without moving from their seat, employees can utilize business intelligence platforms to discuss and collaborate on projects without wasting precious hours in the conference room.

This is just another way Panorama feels social business intelligence will change the enterprise as we know it.

Building on such a concept, the revolutionary Panorama Necto is a unique tool that allows team members to collaborate without disturbing each other with meetings by seamlessly integrating into current workflows. This could change the corporate culture forever!

With the social capabilities of Panorama Necto, analytics users no longer have the need to step away from their desk. Everything they would have accomplished in the conference room can be handled right from their desk. That’s because users work together on a social platform to gather insight on stored enterprise data and share their ideas about what it means and how it can be used to promote better decisions and revenue.

Hopefully you read this before your next meeting and start taking first steps into the future of collaboration.

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.

Perhaps what we’re most proud of are the announcements made during the conference.
First, I had the privilege of signing a memorandum of understanding – industry talk for an agreement – with Microsoft general manager Doug Leland to have Panorama be one of the first vendors to offer a complete business intelligence suite on Microsoft’s Denali, the company’s next generation of SQL Server.

With this agreement, we are one of the first partners to natively connect with the new Denali solution. This will be a major differentiator for Panorama, with the ultimate in-memory OLAP BI solution in the marketplace. It was truly a landmark moment in our company’s history.

But the good news didn’t stop there. Our successful trip to Hollywood continued with the announcement that Panorama Necto is now fully interoperable with Microsoft’s cloud platform, Azure, giving more companies access to our BI 3.0 solution.

Of course, it wasn’t all work and no play during our time on the West Coast.

Panorama kicked off WPC 2011 with a VIP party in the posh Mixing Room of the Marriott Hotel. Invited guests include a number of executives from Microsoft and the numerous partner organizations that were in attendance.

It was such a great week that all of us at Panorama are sorry to see it go and are already looking forward to next year!

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.

According to report author Dion Hinchcliffe, an independent business strategist and enterprise architect, there are three main aspects of a social workplace.

“Many organizations will make these changes organically and eventually end up with an environment [focused on social] … though it will develop more on its own than some internal business leaders would probably like,” Hinchcliffe wrote. “Other organizations will deliberately attempt to get there more quickly and will have slightly more control over the outcome.”

Implementing a social network for use among workers is the first element identified in the report. Many internal social networks consist of rich user profiles that connect workers. According to Hinchcliffe, “The connections you have – and with whom – determine your sphere of influence and ability to get things done as much, if not more, than the traditional grapevine of old.”

Observable work is another necessary social element. Just like with their personal social networking profiles, employees should use their internal pages to conduct projects, tasks, documents, and collaboration sessions. And because they are in a social media setting they are open to greater participation.

Finally, and here’s where social business intelligence can come in, social workplaces should foster insight and analysis. All employees should feel comfortable enough to offer their own thoughts on business data, meetings or projects.

According to the recently released State of Business Intelligence survey from the BeyeNETWORK, 30.8 percent of respondents predicted a dramatic increase in demand for overall BI services and a total of 50.8 percent see either a slight or dramatic increase for the integration of social BI.

Source:
ebizQ

See other news in Social Business Intelligence

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.

“The focus on the relevancy of information is a transformative force in the consumer marketplace,” Panorama Software vice president of research and development Kobi Averbuch said.

Powerful and complex algorithms allow the solution to identify noteworthy data points specific to individual user needs and tastes, according to the company. And because the process is automated, efficiency is upheld for less technically savvy end-users.

“Necto marks the first time true relevancy is offered to BI in the enterprise,” Averbuch said. “By automatically delivering relevant insights to the users, Necto eliminates the need of business users to understand the ‘how’ and focus on the ‘why.’”

According to Averbuch and an IT Business Edge report, this concept is borrowed largely from social network websites and some of the largest online companies. Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Google and the like are constantly striving to present the most relevant information and offerings to their users.

For Amazon, that could mean an increase in sales by presenting customers with products they may be interested in purchasing. For BI, it means getting end-users the relevant information they need more quickly and easily. The innovation could be another in a recent line that have changed business intelligence for the better.

According to market research firm Gartner, adoption of social business intelligence technology will increase during the next four years. In a report published earlier this year, Gartner predicted the popularity of social BI platforms to rapidly increase during the next 12 to 18 months. By 2013, social BI will account for 15 percent of all deployments, according to Gartner.

Learn more about Social Business Intelligence

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.”

But companies have begun reversing this trend through the use of social business intelligence, which brings together the collaborative capabilities of social media with the traditional BI technologies that put a company’s data to good use.

By introducing collaborative technologies to their business intelligence platform, companies are better positioned to utilize and take advantage of their employee data.

According to Shah, collaboration and business intelligence have always been intertwined, but companies are just recently beginning to realize the benefits of the connection.

“It allows us to save such discussions for the long-term, kept in context with what is being asked, and allows each person to ask the way they intended rather than what was filtered through our minds,” Shah wrote.

The same structure of traditional business intelligence can apply, where controls are set for who has access to information and allows for the refinement or discussion of a question. According to Shah, the key point is that such interactions become part of the “life of the business data itself.”

Moving forward, Shah encourages companies to foster a business culture where open feedback and communication is encouraged. Data itself is not as valuable as the insight given.

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!

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…

Twitter and Yammer, 2 micro-blogging services are doing what “cutting layers of management” has failed to accomplish for such a long time!

I’m a heavy twitter user (http://twitter.com/oudiantebi) and aside of my personal account also manage the pubic panorama software account (http://twitter.com/panoramaSW) that we use to communicate with customers and partners. We also implemented Yammer, “the twitter for enterprises”, at panorama that provides the same functionality as Twitter but only for people inside the firewall.

The usage of Twitter and Yammer at Panorama has grown significantly and today almost 90% of employees have “joint the conversation”. Our #1 user is our CEO who shares openly the things he is doing and is actively “listening” to the messages that are being shared across the organization.

I can proudly say that we’ve become totally flat in a matter of 2 months! The change is astonishing and impactful in ways that have changed how we operate in all aspects of the company.

How did it affect us?

The best example is our CEO who gets dozens of comments and feedback from employees in real time, the entire organization can track and see the feedback form across the organization and we all know what our CEO focuses on in real time.

For example, recently a support engineer was on a call with a customer that was having some problems with deploying our product, the engineer wrote the following message using Yammer: “got a call from XYZ and they have a problem with a feature in our product, doing my best to get it resolved so they can go live on time”. 2 minutes later the CEO replies “how can I help make them happy” and 2 more minutes later the head of R&D assigning a person to help solve the problem in real time. All in all it took us 10 minutes to solve a problem that would usually take days to resolve using the normal processes.

All this could be done before but the process to get there was much longer. The ability of the support person to get the attention of the CEO was slim to non existent.

Same thing goes for Twitter. A customer that we follow on twitter wrote that he was trying to deploy our solution in a record time of 2 days. The moment I saw this message we assigned 2 people to help them to make their goal. This was a mind blowing experience that made this customer a fan for life.

The amazing fact is that Yammer was introduced as a small utility and was never meant to change our company so profoundly. I can clearly say that after email, Micro-bloging is the most impactful technology on organizational culture and behavior.