People don’t make decisions based on data alone. They take into account the opinions, ideas, experiences, and perspectives of other people. Conversation and collaboration help create the context around data and drive decision-making forward. It’s this need that social BI aims to meet.

A few weeks ago I had conversation about social BI with a QlikTech partner based in Sweden: Peter Skoglund of EdgeGuide Business Solutions AB. EdgeGuide is an IT service provider that has practices in areas such as BI and social media utilizing IBM Lotus Connections. Peter shared with me some of his personal perspectives about the future of social BI.

He described a scenario in which a business user explores data in his Business Discovery app. This exploration leads to questions, conclusions, and insights. The user shares his insights with his team by creating and sharing notes and comments. The BI software passes metadata about the notes and comments to the enterprise social software. The team members interact with the analytic app to gain new insights and with the social software to ask and answer questions of each other, and compare their analysis and conclusions. The team reaches a decision based on the data and their interactions. All notes and comments are stored for future use and knowledge transfer.

This got me thinking . . .

My conversation with Peter Skoglund got me thinking about a question that’s near and dear to my heart, as a former industry analyst who covered information workplaces at Forrester Research. An information workplace enables aggregation of software functionality that helps knowledge workers access the information and expertise they need. It brings together multiple technologies in a seamless, contextual user experience. (See related Forrester blog post, “The Information Workplace Gets Social.”)

The question is this: What’s the right context for users to engage in social BI? Should social and collaboration tools be delivered to users as part of their BI platform? Or should BI capabilities be delivered to users as part of their enterprise collaboration platform, or information workplace? Part of what drives this question is IT’s desire to minimize the overlap in the tools they make available to users, as well as users’ desire for a fun, easy experience and clarity about when to use which tool in their portfolio.

I’ve got lots of thoughts about this and will write more later this week. I’d like to hear your take. What is your approach to social BI? What do you think is the right way to deliver social BI to business users?