How BI and Data Analytics Professionals Used Twitter in June

Author: Amanda Brandon
Spotfire Blogging Team

June was a busy month on Twitter in the Business Intelligence and Data Analytics space. This month we saw new trends in the convergence of the social business and BI, mobile BI’s growing effect on business and new attention to the growing demand for BI and analytics talent.

Let’s jump right in with the awards:

Most ReTweeted – Gartner_Inc takes top Tweet (according to Topsy.com) this month for BI with: “Business Intelligence and Decision Impact: Maximize decision impact in real-time decision making.” The Tweet links to a new report addressing the “how and why of BI becoming an expected business competency for improving decision effectiveness.”
Best Twitter Handle – @bigdata, also known as Ben Lorica, a senior researcher at O’Reilly Media, a technology conference and education publisher (@OReillyMedia). Lorica’s Twitter feed led us to an interesting article on a German scientist named Andreas Schleicher who has taken data to the big time – with his drive to reform education by measuring data differently with the Programme for International Student Assessment, which is part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development.
Best Twitter Photo – Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor of economics and information technology at MIT wins best Twitter photo with his sketched profile pic and he’s got some solid data in a recent study that shows data analytics makes companies 5-6 percent more productive.

Tools of the Month
Topsy.com is a key resource for researching info on Twitter. And, they have a new analytics functionality BI and analytics pros should check out. You can run keyword searches against each other and see an interactive data visualization like the one below. In this graphic, we compared the terms social BI and mobile BI – two very hot topics on Twitter in June.

Below the visualization, you can see the trending Tweets by number of mentions in the past 24 hours. At the time of this post, the top Twitter share in this category was an article from EnterpriseAppsToday on how BI and mobile devices will change supply chain management. A worthy read, and this publication is a great follow. Another key piece of Twitter data came from this same source – the report on how colleges aren’t producing enough BI/analytics grads.

The Future of BI

Barry Devlin, who spoke at the International Data Warehousing and BI Summit (hosted by @TechTran) in Rome last month, blogged and Tweeted about the future of our industry. Of note was his comment on how most people focus on the usage of tablets in business and on the user interface. But he says there’s a bigger issue – “the sheer volume of these devices and the data stored on them will make today’s PC spreadsheet proliferation problem look like nothing.”

Big Data in Real-Time?

Derrick Harris, a cloud and infrastructure writer for GigaOM, covered the likelihood of big data in real-time with advances in the way data is analyzed. It’s a great read and Harris makes our list of sources to watch.

The Twitter Fountain of Disruptive Tech

Speaking of resources, R “Ray” Wang, CEO and principal analyst at Constellation Research is another great follow and his very popular blog – Software Insider – is a treasure trove with a Twitter Fountain of info on enterprise software. And, he makes our list for his “disruptive tech leaders in social business” interview with Ram Menon, TIBCO Software Executive Vice President, Worldwide Marketing. Wang alerted us to a trend with this column – the social business.

The Age of Social Business

We looked around the Twittersphere on this topic and came across an article from David Armano EVP, Global Innovation & Integration, at Edelman Digital, in the Harvard Business Review (@HarvardBiz) on how “we are entering an age of social business.” Armano defines it as a “way of doing business in a social context which may feel personal to the outside world but combine complexities internally within organizations that will need navigating. As further evidence to the shift, one can look to technology for yet another clue.” And, social BI is right up there on the list.

Dissertation on Mobile BI

Schools in the U.S. may be struggling to produce data analytics and BI grads, but overseas we’re seeing more programs and calls for participation in academic research around mobile BI. For instance, Lars Saether, a student at Brunel University is seeking input from the Twitterati. Help a fellow out and take his survey here.

Partner of the Month

P2 Energy Solutions is a software company focusing on the oil and gas industry. And, they use Spotfire for data analytics. See their industry specific news and visualizations in their Twitter feed.