There is a lot to be said for all of the activity around social networks in the Web 2.0 world. In short, these networks allow individuals to publish and find information among friends and contacts. Recent work by Microsoft in SharePoint and BEA through AquaLogic demonstrate the desire to team community with content management for the enterprise. Is it merely the realm of portals where community and content merge?
Business intelligence can also take advantage of community networks. Instead of looking at dashboards by role, BI systems could provide users with the ability to collaborate with data services and each other in very visual ways. In theory, users could take sources of information published through BI and related architectures and combine them into visuals, alter and share them in community. The ranking, comment and combination of these services by individuals would further free information and assure the best content (and related reports/visuals) surfaces to assist business knowledge workers.
Sure, today’s BI can allow users to create reports without IT intervention (maybe) and see specific dashboards related to role and function but they still focus predominately on a single user exploring content. Even embedded BI (or BI 2.0) concentrates metrics in point processes.
Meanwhile, the contribution tools of social networks from blogging to exchanging messages on a friend’s wall (see FaceBook) are creating rich tapestries of information (a tapestry that BI attempts to create for the business user). So why not use these same concepts around data sources and informational services to produce viable business content through user relationships around information. This breaks the single user asking questions of a reporting system paradigm that often exists today and makes business intelligence a self-organized conversation.
