How 'Social Business Intelligence' Can Help Your Business

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In this interview, Forrester research analyst James Kobielus talks about how ‘social business intelligence’ combines business intelligence, knowledge management, social networking and collaboration, social media monitoring and analytics. How can it help your business?

eCRMGuide: With the rise of social business intelligence, do you see a fundamental change in BI solutions?

Kobielus: Social business intelligence is about bringing more collaboration into your own BI experience. Traditionally, BI has been about reporting, dashboards and ad hoc queries, and it’s been about the ability to track key business performance and metrics. Traditional BI has been focused on delivering intelligence from data warehouses and other databases, rather than directly from the other users.

Social BI is bringing a collaborative experience into your BI environment, which means that more and more of the BI tools that are available today are allowing users to ask questions of each other and quite often to link those questions to specific reports or visualizations that are presented in their BI environment.

So, to answer the question, it’s really not so much of a fundamental change as a long-running trend in the BI industry to bring more of this collaborative capability into the core experience. What we’re seeing now is that there’s more of an uptake of more Facebook or Twitter style interfaces within the BI tools generally.

eCRMGuide: What does social business intelligence have to offer companies? What are the benefits of incorporating social data into BI analysis? What are the challenges?

Kobielus: In addition to bringing more of a social networking style interface to the BI arena, social BI is also bringing a broader range of types of data from different sources into the BI environment. The big new growth area is in bringing unstructured and semi-structured information from social media sites into the overall BI and analytics environment.

Read the rest about Social Business Intelligence at eCRMguide.