Making Business Intelligence more “Social”

A couple of months back, I had written a post on the idea of Using Business Intelligence in E2.0. In the post I discussed how to bring BI into the social aspects of Enterprise 2.0. George Veth also posted on the topic of Social Objects, which is the concept of the “topic” that two people have a conversation about, opposed to the discussion just being about two people talking. There are many examples of this, both in personal and business settings. Wine is a good example of a social object that spurs a lot of dialog. My wife and I had dinner on Saturday night at a Portuguese restaurant, where a good amount of the discussion with our friends was on the topic of the sangria that we had ordered.

So, in the continued quest to figure out how to enhance the value of Business Intelligence I am looking for suggestions, comments and ideas on how to make BI more “social”. Much of today’s BI systems are what I would consider one-way, meaning a majority of solutions produce content to consumers and it stops there. There is no doubt that people are socializing what they are seeing, but not in a way that we are seeing other social computing being applied inside the enterprise. It can thus be said that BI is like Web 1.0 in the sense that a majority of the content is produced by a small group of “users” and consumed and that’s it.

So how can we make BI social?

The Bloglines are open and there are no bad ideas here. I am hoping to spur some discussion and ideas to advance the cause. Maybe we can get to BI 1.5 by the end of the summer.