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.

For those interested in the topic of Enterprise 2.0....

I just received the final evaluation from the DIG conference and the feedback was great. Across the board we had positive scores and commentary from attendees. Here are a few snippets that I wanted to share:

What valuable insights are you walking away with?

• I now understand E2.0 and its possibilities- Andrew McAfee was excellent.
  
• Predictive markets, social networks can have lots of potential positive impacts, could use it to solve a MDM problem.
  
• I have learned master data management concepts. I wanted to get a better understanding of how business intelligence fit into their organization. Learning about enterprise 2.0 and making me aware of some of the new technologies.

Did the Conference Exceed/ Meet / Not meet your Expectations” Why:

• It met my expectations on the first day and exceeded on the second day. I was looking for new things and found it the second day with E2.0.
  
• I would have liked to have some formalized network opportunities with other speakers wither during or prior to the conference.
  
• This met my expectations, although I wished there were more technical components and that the attendance was higher.

All great feedback and certainly will help us shape next year’s conference. Any additional thoughts from those who attended would be appreciated.

One of the big takeaways for me was the level of excitement on the topic of Enterprise 2.0. Going into the final day, I was a bit concerned. Not because of our speakers, but instead based on our preconference survey results. We had asked our delegates two questions prior to the conference on the topic of Enterprise 2.0.

As you can see from the results of the first question, we had a limited number of organizations (<5%)>

For those still interested in the topic of Enterprise 2.0, there is an E2.0 conference in two weeks here in Boston. I believe this is the second year (I could be wrong, so don’t hold me to that) and they have a great lineup of speakers, including Andrew McAfee who was our keynote on Day 2. Professor McAfee will be moderating a panel discussion on the topic of “Enterprise 2.0 Reality Check”.

Dashboard Competition

For all of those Tufte wannabes out there, BonaVista Systems has created an interesting dashboard competition. There are some requirements to enter, such as the dashboard must be developed in Excel and use their Microcharts product (great marketing move). Seeing that I am like a caveman when it comes to visually designing a business dashboard, I figured I would share the competition with others since there is no chance I can win the first place prize, an Apple iPhone.

Let me know if anyone submits an entry. I will provide some free publicity to those daring enough to jump into the competition.

Example of Data Quality Gone Bad

At the DIG conference, Glyn Heatley introduced our data theme with an entertaining example of data quality gone bad. The story was told through a YouTube video. I had stumbled across this story in an industry magazine a few years ago, but I can’t seem to find the original article. Thought I would share the video so people can use it any time someone questions the quantifiable value of data quality initiatives.

Business Intelligence:”I’m not dead.”

If you are a fan of Monty Python, you will recognize this line from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”.

I had a bit of a positive experience today with a client that caught me a bit off guard. It may be because there are times in this industry where you feel business intelligence has become a commodity. Seems like every organization owns at least one, and in most cases, multiple BI tools. There is pressure in the consulting industry from offshore resources, which I am personally not convinced about for BI applications. So needless to say, at times I am a bit jaded.

So that brings me to today. I am working at a client to build out a new reporting architecture. It’s a pretty significant size initiative and will replace numerous disconnected reporting packages that are managed through a hodge podge of manual processes. We are using the Cognos 8 reporting platform, specifically Report and Query Studio. As part of design, we have been prototyping a reporting package that is currently being done in Excel and packaged into PowerPoint. There are a lot of charts, formatting and commentary that goes into the package. Thus far, I have been thoroughly impressed with the Cognos tools to replicate the current set of reports. But the shocker was the level of excitement from business users who are currently saddled with creating these reports manually. And on top of that, the flexibility to expose the dimensional model would support a majority of the ad-hoc requests that the group receives.

So the point is I guess people are still not getting what they can from their investments in business intelligence and corporate performance management technologies. A majority of organizations are still in the 80/20 position of spending 80% of their time gathering data, creating highly formatted reports manually. If that is the case, it is hard to be called a commodity. I guess the software could be since the tools are there, but organizations haven’t yet realized the value from the investments.

There is another scene from the Holy Grail that draws parallels to the current state of BI.

King Arthur: Go and tell your master that we have been charged by God with a sacred quest. If he will give us food and shelter for the night, he can join us in our quest for the Holy Grail.
French Soldier: Well, I'll ask him, but I don't think he will be very keen. Uh, he's already got one, you see.

(Replace King Arthur with software sales rep and Holy Grail with BI tool)

Back in the Saddle

After taking a couple of days off, I have found that I have a bit of writer’s block. Between responding to the mountain of emails that piled up last week and getting back into the blogging groove, I am a bit stuck. That being said, I came across a couple of articles that I wanted to post some thoughts on.

There seems to be a lot of chatter around mobile BI. I came across 3 separate articles in the last week related to analytics being delivered to mobile devices. The first was an announcement by IBM that they will deliver business solutions through new BlackBerry devices. This includes the Cognos 8 Go software. The second article was from Intelligent Enterprise and had three case examples of businesses that are using mobile devices to deliver BI. The interesting thing I found with this was the simplicity of the applications, which seems critical when dealing with a small interface and only needing specific KPIs. The final announcement is a clinical specific application built by Vaultus Partners and Covisint that delivers patient dashboards to mobile devices.

One trend in all three of these articles is that BlackBerry is the device of choice. Not surprising since RIM has a strangle hold on the enterprise mobile market.

If you read through these and are wondering “How the heck can I be thinking about mobile BI?” when you can’t even get desktop-based reporting, don’t worry. Eventually, you will get to the point where these type of solutions will be possible.

Day 3 Highlights - Conference Wrap Up

Well, DIG 2008 wrapped up yesterday. I just got back from Vegas and have finally recovered from the long flight back to Boston. It was a great event and some of the informal feedback from attendees confirmed that feeling. It would be great to get some comments from attendees on what people thought was valuable and where we could improve for next year.

Day 3 was focused on Enterprise 2.0. If you aren't familiar with E2.0, our keynote for the day was able to level set the group on the definition, usage and benefits. Andrew McAfee from Harvard Business School, who coined the term Enterprise 2.0, provided his perspective on E2.0. From his presentation he provided the following definition:

"Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within
companies, or between companies and their partners or customers."

He also identified a list of representative technologies below this definition: wikis, blogs, prediction markets, social networking software, RSS, links, search, tags.

After Andrew's keynote, we then moved into our case study presentations with R. Todd Stephens, Mat Fogarty and Euan Semple. We followed up the case study presentations with Q&A. I was happy to see that we got a lot questions from the group, since prior to the conference a large majority of the attendees (70%) had no plans in their organizations to adopt E2.0 technologies.

We concluded the DIG conference with an entertaining talk from Jeff Ma. If you aren't familiar with Jeff, he is the real life character from the book "Bringing Down the House" and subsequent movie "21". Aside from the challenge of being the final presenter at 4 pm, Jeff kept the crowd entertained and was peppered with questions by the group at the end.

I haven't had a chance to step back and try to put the different presentations and dialogs over the week into something coherent. I took a ton of notes during the 3 days and we have the audio recorded, so it will be good to go back and listen to the presentations and discussions. We are hoping to make some of these great assets available through the blog. Stay tuned.

I want to finally thank everyone that attended the conference: the speakers, delegates and sponsors I was happy to see that even with all the distractions of Las Vegas, everyone stayed engaged throughout the entire week.