Introduction
In this digital age, there is virtually no way to escape it. Facebook reports they have more than 500 million active users (Facebook 2011) , Twitter boasts over 95 million tweets per day (Twitter 2011) , and YouTube announced that it passed 2 billion views per day (YouTube 2011) … Almost a year ago! Wikipedia has had almost 500 million page edits (Wikipedia 2011) by contributors since its founding. The message is clear. Social media is here to stay and it is a tool that you should capitalise on. In 1999 it was Microsoft who completely changed their strategy in order to capitalise on the latest trend. Up to that point, Bill Gates was stuck on the concept of PC-based solutions and arguably saved his company by recognising the importance in this evolving technology. That technology is famously the internet and the flip-flop on strategy to leverage the web rather than fear it changed the world we live in today. This is an example of what could have happened if Microsoft had missed what was seemingly an obvious goldmine of opportunity.
It is a prudent exercise to revisit some terms that happen to be the topic of this paper. Since both of these areas are constantly evolving (just like the English language), it is acceptable to select one that is in the spirit of the concepts and supportive in a way that allows this evolution to occur. It is a certainty that these terms are widely misinterpreted and misused in businesses today.
I have chosen a 2006 Wikipedia definition of business intelligence. If you were to search the term today you will find that it has changed and has become much narrower and focussed on systems and software. The earlier definition captures a broader meaning behind business intelligence in an organisation. This definition also doesn’t limit the information to what can be found inside the systems of a company, but describes it more broadly as incorporating information from other sources such as those found in social media.
Business Intelligence (BI): is the process of gathering information in the field of business. It can be described as the process of enhancing data into information and then into knowledge. Business intelligence is carried out to gain sustainable competitive advantage, and is a valuable core competence in some instances. (Wikipedia 2006)
Social Media: is the democratization of content and the understanding of the role people play in the process of not only reading and disseminating information, but also how they share and create content for others to participate. It is the shift from a broadcast mechanism to a many-to-many model, rooted in a conversational format between authors and people. Social media describes the online tools that people use to share content, profiles, opinions, insights, experiences, perspectives and media itself, thus facilitating conversations and interaction online between groups of people. These tools include, message boards, podcasts, micro-blogs, lifestreams, bookmarks, networks, communities, wikis, and vlogs. (Solis 2007)
Fig.1 - Social Media Collection and Classification (Olcaytocengiz n.d.)
The definition on Wikipedia and even generally in the social media field is still on a journey as the wider populations become more in tune with the impact this will have on every person wired to the web. Again, the concept of a broader definition that allows growth and incorporation of other ideas is useful to bear in mind as these concepts are communicated to the business.
In Fig. 1 there is a visual representation of some of the growing number of social media services available for individuals to present their views, thoughts, images, feelings and tastes to a wider audience. Social media truly represents a shift from institutional control to consumer control. This shift is why companies are so interested. If you follow the audience, you follow the money. If you are able to understand the habits and behaviours of this audience (whether they are an employee or customer), the ability to unlock value is certainly not that far behind.
The convergence of business intelligence and social media is focused on gathering and making sense of information published by social media networks. The value of this analysis can generally be examined from an internal (employees) or external (customer/supplier/partner) perspective. Gaining knowledge from the social interactions of all individuals that touch your organisation will give you a competitive advantage…if you are doing it better than your competitor that is!
Collaborative Decision Making
One of the emerging concepts that looks to unlock value within an organisation using business intelligence and social media is collaborative decision making (CDM) platforms. Every company is organised around workgroups often loosely defined functionally. In addition to the segregation based upon roles and function, there is a physical separation as well. Sales people sit with sales people, finance mingles with finance and product development are locked away somewhere from everyone else. I am always reminded of Tom Allen’s “30-meter rule” (Allen n.d.) when I think about lost potential in a company due to the low likelihood of interaction due to spatial or role-based reasons. In Allen’s studies, he found that engineers and scientists whose desks are more than 30 metres apart have a communication frequency of almost zero. Incredibly, it was found that the relationship between the volume of communication between co-workers was in inverse proportion to the distance they sat from each other at work. This study was completed before the rise of email and social media and could be used to explain why water-cooler talk seemed to be so invaluable. This demonstrates the natural tendency of humans to feel limited by distance. CDM platforms provide a means to have a “virtual water-cooler” to enhance overall communication.
One of the pre-suppositions of CDM is that an enhancement of the overall communication and collaboration in a company is a valuable thing. In instances where sales communicate regularly with Product Development, Marketing aligns and talks to Sales and Finance regularly visits IT. According to Gartner “CDM improves the quality and transparency of decisions by bringing together the right decision makers and information, assisted by the relevant decision tools and templates, to examine an issue, brainstorm and evaluate options and agree on a course of action.” (Gartner 2010) There should be countless examples how an organisation’s effectiveness can be improved by the introduction of CDM platforms.
CDM platforms combine business intelligence with social networking, collaboration, decision tools and workflow to help make and capture better decisions. Social networking in this instance refers to making use of social media such as wikis, vlogs, forums and blogs to enhance an organisation’s interactions. Social networks have evolved to include multi-dimensional connections with real conversations between users.
There are at least two ways in which BI and CDW are converging. Software vendors are increasingly enhancing their BI platforms to include elements of social media, while others have built their solutions with social media in mind. Lyza (www.lyzasoft.com) provides a way for business analysts to complete analysis such as querying a data source and producing a dashboard, which is not uncommon for any BI tool. The difference is that the dashboard or other information can then be disseminated to what Lyza calls its “Lyza Common” where members in the workgroup can then blog, rate, forward, search and comment on the business intelligence results. The applications for this approach to BI can be profound. The users of the information are able to play an active role in enhancing the output through social commentary. Analysts can respond to the feedback. Users of the information can participate in the shaping of the information and identify any shortcomings in the information that was provided. In a way, it really personalises the delivery of BI from the perspective of an end consumer of the information and the analyst who is delivering it as an information caretaker. This is a radical approach to BI and over the next 18 months as vendors provide more options; other unexpected benefits will surely emerge. One example that comes to mind is when a project manager used BI to deliver project-tracking metrics to her team. In an environment where deadlines and internal expectations are paramount, it is vital to have honest, open communication with the team. The project manager utilised social media to provide a forum for the team to anonymously submit feedback on the timelines and tasks to understand if the goals were achievable. In a perfect world the team would have open channels of communication, but this allowed individuals that were non-confrontational in nature to stream feedback across multiple regions to the project head allowing her to have a clear understanding of the project status from the team.
While there is importance in finding ways to improve and deliver BI within the social network at the office, there is also value in applying BI to the CDM platform and other means of communication within the business, which highlights the other intersection. Learning how departments and functions relate to each other at a macro level can help drive internal operational strategies. For instance, if customer satisfaction with a product is at a low as determined from feedback surveys, the obvious next step is to discover why customers aren’t happy with the product. Is it the quality? Expectations of what the product could deliver? Using the latter example, assuming the customers weren’t provided with a product they were expecting, then how can we work towards resolving this issue and why did the problem occur in the first place? By applying BI to the social interactions, one can create a social map of the interactions to determine where the problem might exist.
Fig.2 – Internal Social Network Analytics
In the simplified example in Fig. 2 using business intelligence to monitor the social media has uncovered that Product Development is regularly in contact with Customer Service rather than marketing. This could be for a variety of reasons including that because of dissatisfaction with the product, customer service representatives are often in contact with the Product Development team to solve or query the issue. The real opportunity and a way to future-proof new innovations is to improve social interactions between Product Development or potentially with the customers themselves. It is increasingly common for expert users of a product to either advise Product Development teams or become part of Customer Care. Regardless of the approach, this demonstrates the value of having this type of information readily available to a business embarking on a social media initiative.
Part II in 2 weeks....
