I raised a question in a recent blog post: 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? (See related Forrester blog post, “The Information Workplace Gets Social.”) The answer depends on a couple of factors.

If and where users can get the social and collaboration capabilities they need

Social Business Discovery is about enabling people to collaboratively create analytic apps, make shared business discoveries, and collaborate on data-driven decisions. Do business users have access to a great set of social and collaboration tools they can use to accomplish this? If so, which environment provides these capabilities to users in the easiest, most intuitive way: the enterprise collaboration tools or the BI platform?

• Several of the BI megavendors made it onto Forrester’s list of the four anchor vendors lighting the way with information workplaces (Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle). (See the October, 2010 Forrester report, “The Information Workplace Light Burns Brighter”―available only to Forrester clients, or for purchase.) These vendors offer a gigantic stack of technology, pieced together through acquisition, which includes both BI tools and collaboration tools.
• But Forrester has pointed out that even after an organization has made a big bet on one of the information workplace platform vendors, the organization may still need to fill in gaps in areas like BI, business process management, and search. And competing analyst firm Gartner pointed out in its “2011 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms” that one BI platform may not be enough; to ensure that the needs of business users are met, IT organizations should take a portfolio approach to BI.

Users’ primary work environment for decision-making

In which software environment(s) do people spend the bulk of their time? And where do they go when they need to make a decision?

• Some information workers may spend their time with their laptops and an information workplace—and they may best be served by accessing their BI tools in this context.
• Other people make go into a decision application (like QlikView), and while in there make a discovery they want to share or discuss with someone.
• Still others (e.g., data wranglers, power analysts, or data-driven decision makers) may by the very nature of their jobs spend nearly all their time in their BI environment.

There’s no one right answer—no one-size-fits-all solution. For some organizations, the dominant approach to social BI will to be to deliver BI to users in the context of an information workplace. In these environments, BI tools should integrate with the existing enterprise collaboration platform. Other organizations will choose to deploy BI platforms that have embedded social and collaboration capabilities. And it’s likely that even in an organization that settles on one of these options as the enterprise standard, not all users will consume (achieve?) social BI in the same way.

How does it work in your organization? Has your organization deployed information workplaces—and if so, is BI delivered to users through them? Are you using BI software that has built-in social and collaboration capabilities? Are you running into “when do we use which tool?” problems? I’d like to hear from you―drop me a line at erica.driver@qlikview.com or leave a comment below.