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Understanding Social And Collaborative Business Intelligence

Social and collaborative BI

In this day and age, we’re all constantly hearing the terms “big data”, “data scientist”, and “in-memory analytics” being thrown around. Almost all the major software companies are continuously making use of the leading Business Intelligence (BI) and Data discovery tools available in the market to take their brand forward. Efficient tactics can be created along with a better overall decision-making process within an organization with the help of social and collaborative business intelligence tools. This can be done with the help of socializing ideas within an Enterprise Business Intelligence tool, be it with or without an Enterprise Social Network (ESN). Let us take a look into the individual concepts of social and collaborative business intelligence to learn more about how they help companies.

What is Social Business Intelligence?

Social BI indicates the process of gathering, analyzing, publishing, and sharing data, reports, and information. This is done using interactive Business Intelligence and Analytics dashboards along with intuitive tools to improve data clarity. Analytical tools are used to achieve user understanding and comfort. Confident decisions can be taken by employing social BI, as it puts all the users on the same page with regards to activities, tasks, and goals being driven by a shared understanding and use of analytical tools and results.

One of the most imperative features of social BI is its ability to create self-served and user-generated analysis, coupled with the application of business user knowledge. It also includes the skill to generate and share reports and data without the help of data scientists or any staff from the IT department. Improved results in product development, projects, business processes, and quality control can be seen through social BI’s data sharing and analysis across teams, divisions, and business units.

How Social BI Helps Businesses Attain Success

Let’s picture an ambiance where business users can make use of a business intelligence and analysis portal and view the popular data that can be rated, shared, and commented on. Resources can be optimized through this type of sharing by allowing users to access reports, dashboards, and data that can possibly be just what they require to complete a task or analysis. When social media and social networking is implemented within the Business Intelligence environment, business users can share, rate, discuss, and learn from others.

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Through the application of social business intelligence, power users can be nurtured within an organization. These are the users who approach data analysis in an insightful and creative manner. For example, users of social media show their support towards a post through ‘likes’ and encouraging comments or reposts. Similarly, whenever your organization witnesses a positive kind of sharing, collaboration, and learning, a social business intelligence tool can support it. A business user can learn to develop a better understanding of analytics and also become comfortable using these techniques once data sharing becomes more common and more power users emerge. This will also lead to an organization witnessing improved user adoption of online BI tools.

Social business intelligence tools help encourage collaboration, reveal the data and content valuable to users, and help create popular business users and content. Popularity is not just chosen to measure quality, but also to measure business value. It provides insight for IT and BI teams to standardize data and content in addition to providing high quality, certified, and curated data to the users. Business users can learn from one another, and can also share, rate, and discuss. They can also optimize their time if they don’t have to reinvent a report. Collaborative decision-making among business users is promoted through the use of Social Business Intelligence software. It also facilitates BI tool user adoption, allowing the organization to share knowledge and resources.

Collaborative Business Intelligence

Collaborative business intelligence is the process of business intelligence and collaboration technologies coming together to support an ambiance of new and improved decision-making methods. In collaborative business intelligence, the workers and business managers interact with each other in order to improve the communication system. They share the important findings related to business intelligence and discuss their respective meanings and the possible options available to improve the performance of the business. Discovery and documentation serve as key features in collaborative BI.

With the help of collaborative methods such as utilizing a business dashboard, workers are able to share information as to why certain events are unfolding in a particular way and so on. Using related data, content, and the business context behind findings, users can add their own knowledge to the results of business intelligence. Through feedback mechanisms including comments, ratings, tags, blogs, and microblogs, the results of published BI can be enhanced.

The main motive behind any BI program is to make timely and more efficient business decisions, and a collaborative business intelligence environment supports that by letting the members assess the situations and make decisions as a team. Organizations can also analyze the validity of the decisions taken and the impact they will have on the business. This kind of analysis leads to feedback that can aid in improving the decision-making process, letting companies document the best practices and monitor the data that’s the most useful in this scenario.

The three most important aspects of collaborative business intelligence are as follows:

  • Knowledge Discovery: When IT departments isolate a user’s experience to mere reports, it can be quite stifling. However, with collaborative business intelligence, users can resort to reusing the ideas and capabilities that are already available, hence eliminating the need to reinvent the wheel. When such collaboration software is used, users can enhance the information they possess by sharing it with the other users as well.
  • Knowledge Retention: The intellectual property of organizations all around the world and the items under them are not documented on a daily basis. However, collaborative BI helps in changing that. Collaborative software helps in institutionalizing structured as well as unstructured data to facilitate the sharing of insights, thoughts, information, and practices.
  • Knowledge Proliferation: With the prevalence of the internet and social media in general, all the good things are shared and passed around in a matter of minutes. Similarly, when users come across software sites and solutions that are easy to use, they will pass the word on to their friends, family, colleagues, and so on. Therefore, this will lead to the growth of your data warehouse due to all the conversations that will take place, requiring information from both inside and outside the organization.

Summing Up

Both social and collaborative business intelligence are new-age tools that help in making business decisions. They make the process smoother by involving more people from any given organization. Everyone pools in their thoughts and ideas, evaluates the insights and findings and results, post which decisions are made on how to move forward with any given situation. Therefore, they are both business intelligence tools that companies should be employing in the current era in order to make more efficient and competent business decisions.


Author Bio: 

Rachael Chapman: A Complete gamer and a Tech Geek. Brings out all her thoughts and love in writing blogs on IoT, software, technology, etc.

Website Link: https://limeproxies.com