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business|financial|projects

Business intelligence tools becoming more collaborative

16th November 2018

By: Schalk Burger

Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

     

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Business intelligence (BI) tools are adopting various collaboration features and tools to better match the collaborative aspects of business processes and workflows, says business information software firm AIGS Insights sales and marketing director Gustav Piater.

Users need to be able to put their thought processes and motivations into reports, dashboards and analyses through comments, annotations or even collaborative votes. They should be able to choose how and when to be notified of new reports and even alerted when certain parameters they have chosen and set up, have been exceeded, he explains.

BI tools that are not collaborative reduce an organisation’s corporate memory on decision-making. BI tools and platforms are, therefore, adopting social-media-style communication and collaboration functions to improve outputs through better engagement, as well as promote knowledge retention and decision-making lineage.

“Users should not be forced to leave the BI platform to collaborate around business process outcomes. However, traditional BI tools are limited to numbers and charts, with scant information about the context and intent behind these decisions and figures to improve decision-making,” he emphasises.

Not being able to collaborate and assess the context of business information means an organisation cannot effectively build corporate memory around decision-making, leading to ineffective knowledge-induction programmes, poor knowledge retention when even low-level staff leave, and limited success of even the best knowledge-driven projects, avers Piater.

“The style of communication and collaboration of social media has been adopted by enterprise software platforms and this enhances user experience, increases uptake, promotes knowledge retention and improves outputs through better engagement.”

BI tools that have integrated social messaging, collaboration and workflow into their processes have become custodian platforms for organisational memory by capturing of corporate knowledge, he explains.

Collaborative features that should form part of a business’s BI platform include report annotations, exception notifications and alerts, messaging and comment streams, media support for videos, articles and Web links, voting and polling, task management and timelines, he says.

These features are present in customer-relationship management (CRM) tools, but BI tools need market insight and analysis to drive business strategy.

“In providing these insights, BI tools reach into markets, and industry data lends itself to the production of comprehensive strategic reports,” avers Piater.

BI platforms are strong in reading multiple data sources and can add value to CRM platforms by analysing additional data sources, including social media trends, Internet of Things logs and other unstructured data and Big Data. Simultaneously, BI needs to emulate the collaborative strengths of CRM platforms.

“BI tools with collaborative functionality provide searchable and auditable organisational context that leads to financial decisions from a range of information sources,” concludes Piater.

Edited by Martin Zhuwakinyu
Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

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