BI and the Increasing Use of Social Networking

The role of social media within BI is becoming more prominent.  Not only is information on the Internet being used to drive analytics, but the way in which BI is being presented is slowly shifting towards ease of use, collaboration, and self-service models.  Each of these aspects enable organizations to take advantage of social networking concepts to pull data together and to use it to view the market place and analyze customer preferences more broadly.

The role of social media within BI is becoming more prominent.  Not only is information on the Internet being used to drive analytics, but the way in which BI is being presented is slowly shifting towards ease of use, collaboration, and self-service models.  Each of these aspects enable organizations to take advantage of social networking concepts to pull data together and to use it to view the market place and analyze customer preferences more broadly. Between ease of use, community like settings, and the ability to track consumer activities online, social media is proving to be beneficial to companies for both internal and external applications – whether leveraging technology to drive internal usage, or looking at what data exists externally that can be used as additional data points for decision making.

As businesses start to look at the role of social media within their organizations on a deeper level, many will develop deeper connections integrating social networking concepts into their daily business processes. An article that was just posted on DashboardInsight discusses this concept further: The Convergence Of Social Media And BI.