Two Heads Are Better Than OneBI is usually a solitary pursuit — so when and why should users collaborate over reports and analyses?Continued from Page 1 Managers are held accountable for the performance of their piece of the business, as represented by metrics and KPIs that are visible to most managers across the enterprise. Thus, a manager must document the resolution of the problem so collaborating managers can see and understand it. In fact, more rigorous forms of BPM (Balanced Scorecard, for example) require that managers annotate all metrics, explaining to colleagues how a metric got its current value, even when on plan. Therefore, BPM is, by nature, both analytic and collaborative. Collegial NexusA corporate portal is a nexus, a single point where business colleagues converge as they access applications, bodies of documents, and information sources. Most portals focus on documents and their collaborative functions, such as annotation, cataloging, and publish-and-subscribe mechanisms. Other collaborative functions may include discussion threads (perhaps email-based) and user profiles (to identify experts or people of common interest). Although these collaborative practices and enabling technologies were designed for unstructured text documents and knowledge management (KM) processes, many of them are now available in vendor BI portal offerings, although applied to reports of structured data. Thus, the corporate portal can be an important platform for collaborative analytics, where they naturally intersect with collaborative KM. In fact, a portal that supports both BI and KM can increase the speed, accuracy, and depth of collaborative decision-making across multiple people, processes, organizations, and technology platforms. Corporate Culture Contra CollaborationThe cause of collaborative analytics isn't without its challenges. On the corporate-cultural side, the leading barrier is that BI tends to be a solitary task, not a communal one. And users who need collaborative analytics the most tend to have limited influence in their organizations, as with users deep in the organizational chart who are just now receiving BI. Furthermore, the best practices for implementing collaborative analytics are still nascent. On the technical side, few IT personnel or consultants realize that analytics can be collaborative, much less recognize when they should be. BI portals and analytic procedures aside, collaborative features are still quite rare in BI tools. And creating an analytic procedure and other collaborative functions requires a technical person who understands the business process. Two heads are better than one, but only in appropriate circumstances. User organizations should recognize that collaborative analytics aren't suited to the workflow of all BI users, nor are they appropriate for the BI infrastructures of all corporations. It works best when a business practice demands it (as with BPM), collaborative infrastructure enables it (as portals do), or when users inexperienced with BI require the collaborative assistance of experienced BI users (as when masses of new users come online). Without the appropriate incentives, infrastructure, and user needs supporting a business case for collaborative analytics, they're just another alternative practice running against the mainstream. Philip Russom, Ph.D. [www.PhilipRussom.com] is a Giga Research Director at Forrester Research Inc., where he provides advice to user organizations about business intelligence, data warehousing, and data integration. RESOURCESRelated Articles at IntelligentEnterprise.com: "Paving the Path to Epiphany," April 3, 2002 "The Best-Laid Business Plans," April 16, 2002 "Scoping Out Portals," March 6, 2002
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