Mix your own BI

It is interesting to see the social networking and personalization gold rush in the consumer web.

• Pick your feeds, your widgets, your information. See any vendor of choice (iGoogle, Pageflakes, NetVibes and many more).
• The desire to publish to and learn from friends, communities or groups (Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Yelp!).
• And now, with an ocean of content vertical communities are now going to the next level (see Minti).

Break it all down and users are craving relevant information through self-organizing (or at least self-selected) information. And the pace of collaboration and discovery is not about to slow.

Now step back from all the activity of the consumer web for a moment and reflect on statements made as far back as 2005 by Don Tapscott: “What’s driving the change? Collaboration. Increasingly, computers and people can cooperate and intersect in richer ways across the Internet.”

So what does this have to do with the Enterprise — everything! As Irving Wladawsky-Berger cites in a recent blog entry from IBM’s Global Innovation Outlook, “…Rather than existing as static and fixed organizations, more enterprises could essentially become an aggregation of specialized entities with complementary interests — expanding, contracting and reconfiguring themselves in a way that best adapts to or even anticipates market dynamics.” So it is clear, not only is collaboration and access to situational information important it will be one of the key technical drivers to organizations that have to “reconfigure themselves” on the fly.

Traditional BI is simply not in a position to deliver this collaboration and configuration today. And while the user is moving to the center of many BI models it is in fact how groups of users participate in visualizing information together that will key flexible business processes moving forward.  I am not about to claim that Zua Scene has THE answer to the complexity of what is being discussed by Mr. Tapscott or Mr. Wladawsky-Berger.  However, simple steps are required (as well as big breakthroughs) to empower knowledge workers in highly collaborative and informative BI.   I believe that collaboration around semantically enhanced services and the pictures and data stories told through such collaboration will break-down the heavy handed techniques current at work in today’s business intelligence community and Zua Scene is committed to playing a role in this revolution.

So go ahead and imagine the possibilities when users can mix their own BI and simply search, connect and share information as it is needed, together.  It is happening now!