How many of you use social tools in your organization on a daily basis? I’m not talking about email or leveraging SharePoint team sites. I’m talking about using social tools to collaborate with each other, make faster decisions, and act upon them.
We’re seeing a radical shift with enterprise social networks permeating throughout organizations. Employees want to use social tools that they’re familiar with (i.e. Facebook, Twitter)—and they want to leverage enterprise data to back up their decisions. This is what we refer to as collaborative analytics, a.k.a. collaborative business intelligence (BI). Social without enterprise data is just opinions, which doesn’t make for sound decisions.
Collaborative Analytics in Action
I use collaborative analytics every day at work. Each week, I take pipeline data and turn it into meaningful discussions with my teammates. I pull data from our CRM system, slice it the way I want, and share the updates with my team through our social service. From there, we have a collaborative decision-making session to pinpoint what deals we should/shouldn’t target, and then take action.
This is just one example. There are many others like:
- Collaborating and deciding on a marketing campaign
- Figuring out what product to take to market
- Tracking customer success leveraging enterprise data
When I speak with BI customers, most export their BI reports to Excel and email them to coworkers, but there’s no collaboration or action on that data. That’s why social and analytic solutions are converging. According to Gartner, by 2013, 15 percent of BI deployments will combine BI, collaboration, and social software into decision-making environments. Social solutions aren’t just improving decision making on analytics, they’re also changing the makeup of how users interact with business applications.
How are you combining social and analytics in your job? What suggestions do you have?
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