Traditionally, BI is all about building reports, dashboards, scorecards and ad hoc queries which has the ability to track the business performance and various KPI's and is solely focused on delivering intelligence from a data warehouses and other database platforms which host the "structured data".
Social business intelligence combines social media aspects and analytics to give important business insights and it a convergence of several trends. In other words it is simply business intelligence that incorporates knowledge management, social networking, plus social media monitoring and analytics, all combined into a new interface in the business intelligence environment.
To summarize Social Business Intelligence is not a fundamental change from the long running trend in the BI industry other than that it will bring additional collaborative capability into the business insights by adding the analytical capability pertaining to social media.
The below picture indicates a strategic view on how Social Business Intelligence can be leveraged for market optimization and identify business opportunities.
In addition to bringing more analytical data capability of a social networking to the BI arena, social BI will also bring a broader range of types of data from different sources into the BI environment. In the current BI industry one of the growth areas is bringing unstructured and semi-structured data from social media sites into the BI environment and one of the many reasons to do this is that social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Blogs, MySpace, and LinkedIn are valuable sources of customer intelligence. The Companies can find valuable insights from customers about what they really think about the company, products, and have access to their opinions. So in reality if companies are able to access this valuable intelligence about customer insights, this can assist organizations in designing business strategies for better performance. Also this information can be additionally used for predictive modeling and data mining projects to derive historical trends and bringing social data into BI analysis helps deliver a complete perspective to the business and gain a better business insight to react on sales strategies etc. Now the organizations will need to decide what social media web sources and social data they actually require to feed into their various key business decisions, whether those decisions are related to marketing, promotions or pricing.
Reliable Software is one of the industry pioneers in the Business Intelligence space and has started building a strategy to deliver social BI since the early inception of this trend. Our diligence in this space starts with determining several factors whether if an organization has their own established BI vendor and has the capability to incorporate social BI into their product. If not Reliable Software can help organizations evaluate the appropriate BI tool that fits the business needs and align with both Traditional & Social BI. In addition Reliable Software's planning services can assist organizations build the appropriate and necessary infrastructure to handle all that social data followed by a data architecture strategy on how data should be stored, maintained depending on the business needs.
As discussed previously one of the major challenge incorporating Social BI is handling the "big data" which in this scenario we can refer to as unstructured data and to this effect Reliable Software has built best practices and has experience with the industry leading technologies such as Hadoop that can handle social BI and helps businesses quickly and cheaply sift through terabytes or even petabytes of Twitter posts, Facebook updates, and other so-called unstructured data. Hadoop is customizable and available free online is created to analyze raw information better than traditional databases. Further to complement the data architecture Reliable Software's in depth experience deploying Social BI solutions using many of the industry leading BI tools such as IBM Cognos, MicroStrategy, Qlikview, Microsoft Power Pivot, Endeca Latitude and TIBCO Spotfire which have already incorporated social BI functionality into their products.
Reliable Software has expertise in deploying Social BI projects using our technology vendor product MicroStrategy. MicroStrategy has released one of its new offerings called Social Intelligence for the Enterprise which has incorporated social BI functionality into their product. Please click on the below link for learn more information on how MicroStrategy can help organizations tap into social media which is gold mine for customer intelligence.
