Extending Collaborative Business Intelligence
When it comes to making decisions with business information it is important to remember that there is never a single person making those decisions. There are divisions, teams, and groups that are formed to tackle specific projects or that collaborate within their day-to-day jobs in order to make decisions that affect the business as a whole. This can be something as grand as which employees to layoff or something seemingly as small as which support incidents to route to which support engineers. In either case, there are business rules and processes that are followed and there are multiple individuals that contribute to the overall outcome.
The idea of collaboration within Business Intelligence is not a new one. SAP BusinessObjects has the ability to enable discussions within the InfoView portal interface so that users can discuss the information presented within reports or documents.
There is also the Business Intelligence offering from Good Data, which allows for the hosting of Business Intelligence content within the cloud and the collaboration of that content directly within their analysis space. Good Data allows for comments to be made against entire reports or for annotations to be made directly within each data element (e.g., cell in a table).
Antivia has also built their Antivia Desktop product which combines Business Intelligence with popular social network sites and the collaborative technologies introduced by Web 2.0. Their product allows for the rating of content, discussions, and the creation of communities with an organization geared towards discussing the effectiveness Business Intelligence.
While all of the above mentioned examples are great in terms of the current marrying of collaborative technologies with Business Intelligence, I think that we need to take this further. Not only do we need the ability to provide more collaborative functionality directly within Business Intelligence software, but we need to find a way to implement it so that users want to take advantage of it – to basically make it fun. For examples of this, we only need to look as far as Amazon. A few of the key features that make using Amazon enjoyable and fruitful are the wide variety of products, the ability for users to review products, and the ability for users to create their own “lists” of products based on a theme. All of these things have allowed Amazon to not only build a great retail site, but to also create a sense of community. Jared Spool talks about these features (and others) in his talk hosted by User Interface Engineering.
How can we leverage the the success of Amazon’s community model and combine it with a new way to think about collaborative Business Intelligence?
In terms of collaborative aspects Business Intelligence software should include the ability to not only rate and discuss content, but to also collaboratively create content. For example, let us say that I am an analyst within HR and I want to analyze the turnover situation from the current date compared to a year ago. I fire up my BI product that my company has purchased, I find the data that I think is a good starting point, and I start analyzing. At this time, I am exploring the data that exists and attempting to come up with some insights around how turnover has changed from last year to this year. If I find something interesting then I am going to save that view and ask someone else to take a look at it. Currently, I have to save the view as a report (or something similar) and then either ask my co-workers to view it, send it to their email, or distribute it via some other means. Why not include the ability to contact my co-workers via the BI system and invite them into a workspace where we can look at my report and analyze it together in real time. This analysis would include talking about the insights that are visible and also modifying the report to better tell my story of how turnover has changed. Not only does this make the final story more complete (through multiple view points), but it also provides my co-workers with the same understanding that I have about the situation. (For more information on real-time editing, see this Wikipedia article.)
Let us take this further and add in the community functionality that we see on Amazon. The turnover story would not only be interesting to HR and senior maangement, but also to the employees at large. Obviously, there is some danger in sharing this type of information as it may make others leave as well; however, in the interest of fostering a community of users within an organization and being transparent, I want to provide all of the employees in the organization with access to this report. So, I publish it on a company-wide portal. The report by itself does not really provide the functionality for the employees to comment on the content or discuss how the information could be better presented – unless of course the portal where I have published the content includes this functionality. What would be good is to have the ability for all employees to participate in discussion threads about the insights seen in the report, rate the report in terms of how effectively the information is presented, and provide feedback to the senior leaders about how they can improve the turnover situation. By providing these features, the Business Intelligence deployment would be providing the mechanisms to foster a sense of community within the organization. In addition, the creators of new BI content, administrators, and organizational leaders would better understand how information is being utilized.
The end goal of the suggestions presented here are to leverage the power of the individuals within an organization. Those individuals are already collaborating on business decisions as they go through processes, perform they day-to-day duties, and work on special projects. We should allow them to continue collaborating as they begin using Business Intelligence content to enhance their decision making abilities. This is another way that we can ensure that BI becomes pervasive.
Addendum: Which other Amazon features would be useful in BI?
“Frequently Bought Together”
This type of functionality would be good to provide end users or analysts with suggetions on for other BI content is typically viewed by users that view the content they are currently viewing. For example, if I am looking at a visualization showing me the turnover in HR, then this feature would show me other content (reports, dashboards, visualizations, etc…) that also discuss HR turnover.
“Customers who Bought this Item also Bought”
This type of functionality could come in handy for BI with a slight twist. For example, it would be good to not only show other content that discuss HR Turnover (as stated above), but also other content that discusses HR or turnover in general. This content could be corporate BI content, other corporate content, or even content from the Internet.
“Inside this Book”
This type of feature has been implemented by some BI vendors already as a means to expose the metadata for BI content. The use of BI content metadata extends into the areas of not only presenting “one version of the truth” and allowing users to see where the information is coming from, but also allows for the linking of content and enhancing search capabilities. For example, in the screenshot from Amazon one can see that they have listed the first sentence, key phrases, and new phrases that exist in the book. This would translate nicely to presenting the description of a report, key phrases used in the report (as they relate to the business), new phrases that appear, the person that created the report, the date it was last modified, and even the last person that viewed the report.
“Listen to Samples”
This would be an interesting way to link BI content to visual and auditory media that is related to the report, visualization, or dashboard being viewed. For example, if I were looking at the HR Turnover report then I would see links for the latest earnings call, a recorded meeting that discussed turnover in the organization, or maybe even a link to a video of a recording traning session on how to motivate employees.
Tags: Antivia, Business Intelligence, collaboration, Good Data, information analysis, pervasive, SAP BusinessObjects, ubiquitous
August 3rd, 2009 at 11:14 am
Coy-
Great post. Good Data enables collaboration around all of our metadata – not just reports as you show above, but also attributes and metrics, data loads, etc.
We built in a great deal of collaboration in Good Data, and we’ve been tracking behaviors since we launched our beta service in December – we are hosting over 2,000 BI projects to date and the findings have been surprising. Comments and annotations on the data are lower than we thought, but we’re seeing a high level of report reuse.
Unscientifically – the biggest impact of collaboration seems to be avoiding ‘report bloat’ by encouraging users to build on top of existing reports as opposed to starting from scratch. We have users who have over 1,000 saved reports in salesforce.com, so the bloat is real.
Let me know if you want to experiment with collaboration within a Good Data project – we can set up a project with data, invite people for the specific reason to see their collaboration habits. We can even make it a public project with no login/access control requirements.
-Sam
August 3rd, 2009 at 11:35 am
Hey Sam.
Thanks for the comment. That is interesting that you provide collaboration around the “objects” (i.e., attributes and metrics). Where do you see most of the collaboration occurring currently? Is it at the report level or the metadata level? I think that most deployments of BI are very young in terms of how they are thinking about introducing collaborative aspects to BI. So, I would expect to see people getting excited about the ability to discuss reports and comment on the effectiveness of an information delivery portal. I would see less of a demand currently for the collaboration around actual metrics and attributes.
I would agree that a big benefit of collaboration is to reduce the bloating effect. We see this constantly with the SAP BusinessObjects products as well. As our Web Intelligence product is designed to be an adhoc and analysis tool, you will see lots of users recreating reports that already exist rather than re-using existing reports. Though, I have seen customers handle this effectively by providing report “templates” – especially within extranet deployments.
I think that the other big benefit of introducing collaborative aspects to BI is the ability to enhance and/or mirror the communities within an organization. There are processes that individuals follow within business scenarios and there is collaboration that happens around those processes. BI is a decision support tool that should fit right into any business process so that any individual or group can make decisions easier by having access to the information that they need. By mirroring the collaborative aspects of an organization within BI we are ensuring that we are helping users make decisions rather than getting in the way of those decisions being made.
I would love to experiment with the collaborative aspects of Good Data. What did you have in mind? Can you create the project and make it a public project? We can then get people to contribute so that we can start seeing which collaborative functionalities become the most used and which ones are not. The results would very interesting.
Coy