What if you made a wrong Decision? An approach to collaborative BI
There is a famous quote from Theodore Roosevelt, "In any moment of decision the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing." Every company these days tend to collect tremendous amount of data across all the departments, goes through the grind of churning the data, putting it up on colorful dashboards and yet, they don't answer the basic question "Am I sure I am making the right decision?" Who else other than me agrees with it?
Traditionally BI tools are read only tools, which means, you can look at the dashboard and reports, do some level of summarization and drill down and view the data from all possible ways. From here on, the decision is made not engaging a wider community. The way you arrive at the decision is not captured or in some cases not even open for discussion. What is lacking is capturing the process of decision making which in turn drives the quality of the decision. The first step to achieve it is to open the BI tool for editing.
Think of a BI application having facebook type "Like"/"Dislike"/"May Be" sort of links in each of its dashboard report. An analyst while viewing the report also keys in his thoughts (collaborative BI), thus opening up a decision making thread. The thought can be challenged by other users accessing the same dashboard. Since now the decision and next step of action is being discussed by numerous other analysts, it is more likely that all the angles of the decision have been thought through. For eg, a Sales guy might comment on the survey feedback from product implementers, or a subject matter expert from finance department can write a comment on the newly published Sales report providing invaluable cross selling information. Validation of your decision by others can lead to a better decision or might save you from making a wrong one.
In my opinion BI tools are slowly transforming from read only phase to being collaborative and promote discussion driven decision making. This is surely going to climb up the list of "must have" features in next generation of BI tools. Lot of BI product now offer some sort of solution to problem. I will talk about few of them in my next article.
How does collaborative decision making happen in your organization? Do you share your BI app using corporate networking tools and store the discussion? Is there a efficient and effective way of doing it? Does this collaborative dimensional data sit with BI data or a CRM tool? Would like to hear your opinion.
Comments
Mukesh, you have touched upon an extremely relevant topic. I believe Collaborative decision making has always been high on the agenda of high performing Organizations but there was never an adequate technology to offer an effective and easy-to-use platform for collaboration. You rightly pointed that most of the BI suites have started offering collaborative capabilities albeit in a limited form. Similarly, the advent of social media and web 2.0 technologies is also giving a fillip to promote a discussion driven environment in Organizations. Just like the first wave of BI was about shifting the paradigm from gut-based decisions to data-driven decisions, I get a feeling that the next leap would be to shift the paradigm from data-driven decisions to data and discussion driven decisions!
Posted by: Karan Chadha | February 14, 2012 7:01 AM