Where BI Fits in the Social Business

Author: Amanda Brandon
Spotfire Blogging Team

Social networking has become more than mainstream; it’s now a way of life – even in business. According to IDC’s new Social Business Maturity survey, 41% of businesses have “some sort of social business initiative underway.”

Previously, we’ve written that social BI is a major part of this new “social business.” While the social mentions and social engagement programs are part of the analytics companies should track via, it’s not the foundation of social BI.

Social BI is more about collaboration among people around the data as Mark Lorion (@mark_lorion), VP of marketing for Spotfire frequently says. His recent article at Knowledgeboard.com (a knowledge management community) describes how meetings should be more collaborative and include dynamic data visualizations to “facilitate collaboration among participants and yield actionable results signed onto by all stakeholders.”

Lorion writes that data visualizations “can change the dynamic and outcome of a meeting.” Using tools with in-memory processing gives you the ability to compare, organize and “play” with information together as a team. The email chains and voice mail tag are less likely as the team interacts with the data and each other.

Additionally, data analytics will be an important factor as social business strategies mature. In an interview last fall, Lorion says that data analytics allows the user to “dive into the information in and behind those reports [from ERP, ledger and payroll systems] and use analytics to ask new questions as they arise.”

IDC reports that social businesses have a scale comprised of five stages including experimentation, compartmentalization, integration, operationalization and optimization.

We see the major key here to be integration. For instance, Spotfire has embrace the need for social sharing of information in real-time by offering customers a stream of information in Tibbr, the ability to share dashboards from anywhere to anywhere with the Web Player and on-the-go collaboration with an app for the iPad.

Next steps: Register for the upcoming “Cloud Analytics Designed for the Consumer” webcast on August 2 at 8 a.m. Eastern.