I don't mean Social BI as in a Social Smoker or Social Drinker - someone who only does it on weekends, in a crowd or once in a while....
I am coming from the collaboration, decision making dialogue, tagging perspective. Where users have a greater ability to collaborate informally as people do with other social sites (LinkedIn, Facebook etc) - harnessing the knowledge held by individuals and supporting users to create communities to encourage adoption and collaboration across the organisation. For example the ability to share photos of safety risks from their camera phone and add tags to enable other users to find them or rating reports based on the number of people who have viewed them or a user rating system so that users can quickly see the high value reports - this information could then be used for future requirements / investment priorities and to avoid reinventing the wheel by discovering the valuable reports. Organisations have a lot of great resources and by empowering the individuals to drive, share, comment, rate their BI / areas of interest will contribute to an exiting, dynamic, and transparent environment. Gartner have highlighted this in their Five Predictions report - "exploit[ing] the groundswell of interest in informal collaboration. Instead of promoting a formal, top-down decision-making initiative, these IT leaders will tap people's natural inclination to use social software to collaborate and make decisions". One leader in this field is Antivia, whilst I prefer to be technology agnostic, some of the things that they are doing are very impressive. A short intro video can be found here.
Looking at some similar examples which are used now - Facebook allows photos, status messages to be commented on and photos can be tagged by other users so a dialogue can be created. Flickr allows photos and videos to be tagged so that users can find similar items of interest or geo. Amazon show you products which are frequently bought with what you are looking at and what other users who bought this have bought (see above). And I haven't even touched Twitter yet:
As always feedback and thoughts would be really appreciated,
John
twitter.com/brookmyre
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