Organizations that harness the power of Social Business Intelligence (BI) can analyze, understand and use information more efficiently and effectively, says Forrester.
Social BI = Better, faster decision-making and action
In a recent interview with eCRM Guide, Forrester Research senior analyst, James Kobielus, said that social BI facilitated organizational collaborative decision-making, and enabled a better understanding of data by linking discussion directly to reports and visualizations. Kobielus said that this enabled decision-makers from a range of departments – sales, marketing, pricing and promotions – to utilize the information gleaned from data analysis more effectively and move from discussion to action in significantly reduced timeliness.
A recent IDG report also suggests that organizations that take advantage of Social BI will improve workforce productivity, by allowing the right people to be easily included in a conversation at the right time, “no matter where it started”.
Defining Social BI
Kobielus defined Social BI, as a fundamental concept, as: “the collaborative knowledge-sharing interface on Business Intelligence”.
For a more extensive definition of Social BI, check out our blog post – Defining Social Business Intelligence.
Organizations slow to adopt Social BI
However, despite the potential positive impacts of Social BI, Kobielus said that many organizations were slow to adopt the new technology.
“Many enterprises are still dragging their heels when it comes to implementing social BI,” Kobielus told eCRM Guide.
“In many ways, Social BI is still a forward looking approach. Most BI in the world is not social, but rather pulls the data from a data warehouse, as opposed to enabling person-to-person knowledge sharing.
“There is already some implementation of Social BI because collaboration functionality is already incorporated into some of the leading BI tools. However, collaborative use of social BI capabilities is not yet a widespread practice in the business world.”
Social BI adoption to grow
A Gartner report on Social BI predicts that adoption will accelerate greatly over the next 18 months, accounting for around 15 percent of all BI deployment by 2013.