Data Analytics and the Importance of Socializing Your Data

The author of this post is Linda Rosencrance of the Spotfire Blogging Team. 

The author of this post is Linda Rosencrance of the Spotfire Blogging Team. 

The fact is we live in a real-time world where data analytics and data overload are becoming more pervasive by the minute. Business decision makers have to know what’s happening now, as well as what will likely happen tomorrow.

What’s also pervasive today is social networking. In fact, organizations of all sizes are adopting social technologies to reap the benefits of social platforms: real-time communication, mobile updates, sense of personality and of course, real-time insights or analysis. You see, companies are turning to social platforms to help their employees work together all the time, to help unlock the creativity in people and teams and to encourage collaboration that helps to motivate employees.

And that means incorporating this same functionality into your data analytics platform so employees can collaborate to make the business decisions that allow you to keep your current customers and acquire new ones.

And you have to do it . . . yesterday.

These internal, business-focused social networks provide some of the same benefits:  instant communication, collaboration, innovation, developing and fostering connections, and information dissemination, according to Ari Lightman, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

Lightman says that “internal social networks are an important social media proving ground.” That’s because you can’t be successful outside your company in terms of engagement if you don’t have an internal social network to test out your messaging and your campaigns so they’ll be more likely to succeed when you launch them to your external market.

Additionally, using internal social networks lets employees use these tools and techniques so they can become experts in fostering community building, as well as data collection and analysis, he says.

IT research firm IDC predicted that this was the year businesses would increasingly turn to social networking tools, forecasting revenue of nearly $2 billion by 2014 for the collaborative decision-making software market.

The president and founder of WiseAnalytics (@wiseanalytics), Lyndsay Wise, believes as business intelligence solutions become more robust and do more to help businesses become more agile, the use of social media as part of software offerings will become embedded within overall BI platforms.

She says that as more businesses use communities such as LinkedIn or Twitter, they’ll integrate social media functionality within their BI platforms to make sharing information and communicating with various people a natural extension of analytics, and support the push toward self-service BI, which will increase the value of their BI solutions.

Next Steps:

To learn how to socialize your analytics across your organization, register for Spotfire’s 11/29 webcast at 1 p.m. EST featuring Boris Evelson, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research.

Linda Rosencrance
Spotfire Blogging Team