Business intelligence (BI) has always had a “pipeline” orientation—in other words, a primary focus on the one-way flow of data, information and insights from “sources” (e.g., your customer relationship management systems, enterprise data warehouses, and subject-area data marts) to “consumers” (e.g., you).
But we all know that this pipeline orientation—also known as “simplex” information transfer—doesn’t describe the predominant flow of mission-critical intelligence in our lives. Quite often, the most important insights are those that issue from other people’s heads, not from our companies’ data marts. Many real-world intelligence flows are full-duplex, many-to-many, and person-to-person in orientation. This fundamental truth will continue to drive the spread of “social” architectures in core BI and advanced analytics.
Forrester has recently seen a growing interest in “social BI,” and in fact my colleagues and I recently
social-blogged our collective thinking on this topic. Since then, we’ve seen vendor announcements, such as TIBCO Silver Spotfire, that invoke this new industry catchphrase. We’ve seen considerable discussion within the analyst community generally about this
release and about what this and other vendors are doing in social BI. In this present post, I’ll be repeating some of the points from my inputs to the earlier Forrester blog, but am extending my observations to call out a broader emerging context.
For starters, social BI is no fad, nor is it an entirely new phenomenon.
As I pointed out more than 3 years ago in the pages of Network World, many BI vendors had already added collaboration functionality such as instant messaging, human workflows, and shared analytic project libraries to their solutions. The trend has deepened since that time, as evidenced by the steady convergence of social networking into BI product architectures, as well as by the demonstration of shared discovery and visualization features in analytics initiatives such as IBM’s ManyEyes project. Yours truly alluded to what we now call social BI when I stated, way back then, that we should “expect to see such interactive Web 2.0 technologies as AJAX, blogs and wikis revolutionize the BI experience.”
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