Lyza – Supporting Collaborative Process in Decision Making

Lyzasoft‘s Scott Davis returned to the Boulder BI Brain Trust (BBBT) last Friday with Lyza version 3.0.  Here’s my key takeaway.  Lyza is the first product I’ve seen that truly understands and delivers the type of collaborative environment needed for innovative and effective decision making.

Lyzasoft‘s Scott Davis returned to the Boulder BI Brain Trust (BBBT) last Friday with Lyza version 3.0.  Here’s my key takeaway.  Lyza is the first product I’ve seen that truly understands and delivers the type of collaborative environment needed for innovative and effective decision making.

Please read that last sentence again–the type of collaborative environment needed for innovative and effective decision making.  Note that I didn’t say “collaborative Business Intelligence”.  I believe that phrase can be a bit misleading, especially to BI people.  And Lyzasoft gets that.  Let me explain…

If you track back to the initial release of Lyza, the product focused on supporting the often iterative data analysis process that business analysts go through in order to reach conclusions and come to decisions.  This is a process that typically happens in the spreadsheet environment, because of the ease of trying, sharing and redoing it offers.  Lyza offered an environment that enabled better control and management of that environment.  And, most importantly, they began to build around that BI tool a collaborative environment where analyses and results could be shared and reused.  For more details, see “Playmarts: Agility with Control–Reconnecting Business Analysts to the Data Warehouse” and “Collaborative Analytics–Sharing and Harvesting Analytic Insights across the Business“, two white papers I wrote in late 2008 and mid-2009.

Now fast-forward to last week and version 3.  What Scott demonstrated at the BBBT was entirely about collaboration.  The analytics tool that was Lyza version 1 was still there, but it had become simply one of any number of tools that a decision maker might use.  The focus of the new release is now firmly, and perhaps entirely, on supporting the collaborative process around decision making.  Rather than emphasizing the data, Lyza 3 seeks the intersection between people, their activities and the artifacts they create, use and share.  This emphasis on people, activities and things is not new in itself; what is new is the intuitive linkage between them and the focus on decision making and action taking that comes from prior Lyza BI tooling.  What we have here is what a decision support system really should look like–it’s about supporting decision making, doh!

If we can look beyond the current hype on big data, the bling of tablets and the search for the holy grail of visualization, it becomes pretty clear that the only thing that finally matters in BI is the decision made and the action taken.  And… by understanding how the decision makers got there to enable them to more easily and effectively repeat and refine that process in the future.  This puts Lyza on the cusp of the next big emerging trend in IT–the “automation” of the human interactions that occur around the data and applications that IT already provides.  I place quotes around “automation” because, of course, this will be a very different type of automation than we have been used to in the past.  This is the integration of Web 2.0 concepts and tools into the enterprise.  Facebook with a purpose.  Twitter in context.  Social networks with a goal.

With version 3, Lyza has stepped boldly beyond the safe and well-understood confines of what BI has mostly thought about so far.  For some, it may pose the question: shouldn’t this type of function come from another market with a different audience?  My response, in the form of another question is: what other market and audience should be looking at supporting, really supporting, decision makers?

The new collaborative Lyza will be available for free use from October.  I highly recommend giving it a test drive!