What impact has Social Media made on Business Intelligence users ?
Posted on Tue, Aug 30, 2011
Sometime between the invention of Facebook and the Apple iPad, people’s expectations of Business Intelligence software changed. Consuming, exploring, and sharing information has been redefined by the search bar, status box, and multitouch screen. Three key trends have led to a worldwide explosion in home computing over the last five years, and now companies are rapidly adopting them.
Consumer Apps. Apps such as Google’s and Apple’s invite users to open a window, start clicking, and become instantly productive. Business users increasingly demand the same experience at work and are frustrated when confronted with cumbersome and complex systems.
Social Networks. A growing majority of workers now use Facebook, Twitter, andLinkedIn at home to share news, crowdsource ideas, and trade files. Social networking is becoming more prevalent in organizations too, as it helps to flatten them by decentralizing decision-making and enabling collaboration among previously siloed people and groups.
Mobility. First smartphones and now tablets (led by the iPad) offer engaging, intuitive, and powerful capabilities that finally deliver on the promise of business-on-the-go.
Where is IT in all of this? Stuck tending to ERP, CRM, BI, and other monolithic systems (as well as facing the task of integrating all this new technology securely into the enterprise). While users don’t expect enterprise applications to be as easy to use as Google, they have been trained to think that asking a question is as simple as entering a couple of keywords and instantly receiving an answer—without having to know where or how the underlying data is stored. All that matters is that their questions are answered fast so that they can act decisively. End users have lost the innocence of their previously low expectations.
This White Paper draws a distinction between traditional BI and Business Discovery. The content discusses how placing tools for innovation in the hands of users extends the power of IT to every corner of the enterprise. And how Business Discovery takes investment in traditional BI and turns it into a dynamic tool for empowering users to help make businesses better. The content was written by CITO Research and sponsored by QlikView and can be used on the website, in content syndication on third party sites, as “nurturing touches” in lead generation campaigns, and for most other marketing and sales uses.