Defining Social Business Intelligence

At Yellowfin, we’ve just released a new version of our Business Intelligence (BI) solution – Yellowfin 5.1 Socialize, Visualize & Decide.

The release has a major focus on the quickly emerging area of Social BI, or as it is sometimes referred to as, collaborative decision-making (CDM) software.

Social BI is an illusive concept, and we found it difficult to define based on research alone. So we took matters into our own hands, and this is what we came up with:

Social BI: A working definition

CDM software and the concept of Social BI is about harnessing and applying the functions and features of social media to the enterprise to enable better CDM processes and bridge the gap between insight and action.

There are three main components to enterprise collaboration. These are:

1. Sharing knowledge and content
2. Discussing and overlaying knowledge on your business data
3. Collectively deciding the best course of action

For the details on sharing, discussing and deciding, check out Yellowfin’s feature page on collaborative BI.

Why is there confusion in the market?

What we found interesting, was the apparent confusion in the marketplace. There seems to be no unified definition of Social BI.

We attribute this mystification to two factors:

1. As Gartner research has indicated, Social BI and CDM software as a concept and product, are in their infancy
2. Many BI vendors are attempting to force fit their existing products under the umbrella of Social BI, accentuating confusion

Easing the confusion

To help clarify Social BI, from our perspective, we’ve included a short YouTube Video.

Yellowfin is making Collaborative Business Intelligence easy.