Sharing – Core to Social BI

Social media is built around the concept of sharing. People share photos on Flickr, movies on YouTube and their life in Facebook.

The consumer side of social media and collaboration is pretty much taken care of – but how can organizations harness this cultural shift for sharing to maximize collaboration within their organization?  Through Social Business Intelligence – that’s how.

Sharing of one form or another already exists – that’s how organizations work. We email, we have intranets, but what’s the next level. How do we do the collaborative Spinal Tap and turn it up to notch 11?

It’s simple – you have to allow employees to share in the way they want to share. Let’s think about what is happening on the Web. At the start we searched via Google to find content, then we emailed links and held a discussion offline. Then there was the advent of the blog – a focal point for discussion was created. People could raise topics, share content and comment on that content, in a place that made sense for them. Organizations do not do this so well…why?

Organizational collaboration has been constrained by enterprise applications that limit sharing. What is needed are applications that embrace sharing – that let non-technical users create and distribute content to their own internal blogs and wikis or even external sites.

Funnily enough, this type of sharing is exactly what we have enabled with Yellowfin 5.1. Anyone can share a report and embed it into a Web page using a simple ’YouTube’ style embed function – we call it Yellowfin connect.  See the example below (yep beer does make you fat)

If you have a wiki page discussing a topic, rather than attaching a static pdf report, you can embed an active Yellowfin report – like the one above.

It is that simple. Sharing turned up to 11.