The internet's academic roots lay in collaboration, but the
rise of client/server computing favoured a more hierarchical way of
working. However, the rise ofWeb 2.0platforms has both revealed and tapped into a
desire for knowledge sharing andcollaboration.
That trend has spread to the enterprise, where the same
collaborative potential of social platforms is being unleashed
within business decision-making, both across the organisation and
within specific departments, such as HR and marketing.
Business intelligence (BI) is at the heart of it, because the
need for analytical tools is growing as enterprises gather
statistics from the internet via cloud-based dashboards and
browser-based mash-ups of rich media streams and begin to release
the customer-specific information embedded within them.
Collaborative decision-making
Analysts at Gartner have identified an emerging applications
market: collaborative decision-making (CDM).
"CDM combines social software with business intelligence. This
combination can dramatically improve the quality of decision-making
by directly linking the information contained in BI systems with
collaborative input gleaned through the use of social software,"
says a recent
Gartner report.
User organisations could cobble together such a system with
existing social software, BI platforms and basic tagging
functionality, says Gartner, "but it will be far more efficient
when software suppliers deliver 'out of the box' CDM
solutions".
Analysis of who the main players might be is conspicuous by its
absence. This is because CDM is currently a trend more than a
standalone category - although 'pureplay' CDM systems are
emerging.
Accord
is a standalone suite, developed by Robust Decisions. The
application melds decision-making templates with social tools and
BI inputs to measure decisions against possible outcomes and to
build consensus within a distributed workforce. An audit trail of
business scenarios is core to the product, which includes
decision-making templates and workflows.
Some enterprises might feel that reducing management to a series
of templates and team referendums may be a level of transparency
too far - what Gartner calls "cultural resistance by
decision-makers". Others might feel it exploits talent within the
team and creates organisational buy-in.
Web 2.0 drivers
Away from pureplay solutions, CDM is an emerging component of
many application types - including BI, HR, talent management and
suites - but it is also a behaviour brought about by the use of Web
2.0 applications.
In the vanguard of this trend is the fact that BI is being built
into collaborative, cloud-based applications. For example,
RightNow Technologies is one
of several software as a service
(
SaaS) players that have introduced BI. Its most recent
quarterly upgrade sees the company offering "business insight on
demand", including an on-demand data warehouse facility and
pre-built BI features.
Virtual world Second Life
is also emerging as a platform for collaborative decision. For
chief product officer Tom Hale, the key benefit is "collapsing
space" and the ability to blend synchronous and asynchronous
activities. "For conferences and events, the benefits are having
all the relevant information and people on demand, which removes
the constraints of schedule and geography," he says.
Greenphosphor.com is
one developer building tools to allow
Second Life users to visualise and interact with complex data
"in world" and then to reach collaborative decisions based on
them.
In the HR space, SaaS talent management company
SuccessFactors has
announced its Employee Central module. CEO Lars Dalgaard describes
the tool as offering "revolutionary organisational insight and
social collaboration for the enterprise" via a social-network-style
interface.
But does this functionality itself need to be based in the
cloud, and if so, what are the advantages and disadvantages of
using a hosted service?
BI specialist Good Data
is one of several SaaS start-ups, including
CloudSwitch and
RightScale, that are
building a new business management space in the cloud. Many of
these companies are built on the
EC2 infrastructure provided by that sleeping giant of the
business cloud, Amazon's
web services.
Good Data CEO Roman Stanek says the advantage of cloud-based BI
is its elastic scalability, which avoids the problems of spikes in
usage. "Traditional IT departments build systems for peak load," he
says. "We don't. It is all about economics, not technology."
Focus on value
The downturn is a factor in the growth of collaborative
decisions. Nick Millman, senior director for information management
services at Accenture , says, "There is a major focus on the value
context, thus a need for greater BI and up-to-date performance
metrics to help companies do more with less.
"The industry is moving towards operational BI where the
intention is to make the power of BI available at the ground level.
SOA has played an important role in making this a reality. BI
permeates an entire organisation and, if used correctly, can
positively influence decisions that affect every functional
area."
Picture from
Greenphosphor.com demo of
Glasshouse, a tool for visualising data in virtual worlds