Business Intelligence Advantages

Web 2.0: Converging Structured and Unstructured Data

For years, business intelligence solutions have given companies the power to develop more successful strategies and make better, more informed decisions.  By tapping into the data that is locked away in enterprise systems, BI tools give companies greater insight into how their businesses run, and the factors that affect success.

But, do BI systems that access only internal data present the whole picture?  Or does additional intelligence exist in other sources beyond corporate walls?

The emergence of Web 2.0 is transforming the face of business intelligence, offering new and more innovative ways for companies to leverage information to boost overall business performance.  The ability to take data from back-end business applications, and combine it with unstructured information from sites across the Web, gives new meaning to the word insight.

The concept of combining structured and unstructured data is nothing new.  Some of the more advanced BI tools on the market provide the ability to report on information contained in emails or documents, while others can analyze the content of audio files. But, many companies are beginning to realize that the world of Web 2.0 has generated a variety of new information resources, such as blogs, RSS feeds, and wiki pages.

For example, a company is conducting in-depth competitive analysis, to identify critical marketplace trends that may impact future sales.  It can use its existing BI solution to pull data about competitive deals from its customer relationship management (CRM) and sales force automation (SFA) systems, such as those that were won or lost when another vendor was involved.  It may also be able to combine that internal information with the content of analyst reports, in-house research, and other documents.

But Web 2.0 takes it even further, providing a wealth of additional information that can shed new light on the perceptions that potential buyers have about the company, and its competition, and their likelihood to buy from one over the other.  The online communities and social networking sites that encompass Web 2.0 give companies unhindered insight into what their target audience really thinks, needs, and wants, and as a result, can make traditional business intelligence activities such as competitive research, sales forecasting, and marketplace trend analysis more accurate and more valuable.

Or, perhaps a company wants to better assess customer satisfaction levels.  Survey data can be pulled from help desk and CRM systems to better understand if clients are satisfied with the products or services they purchased.  But, by combining that data with product reviews, ratings, and other customer-generated content from across the social networking spectrum, organizations can gain the most complete and accurate picture possible.

In fact, the additional context that this approach can add to standard BI is so important, that Aberdeen Research claims that more than half of best-in-class corporations are investigating ways to pull data from Web 2.0 sources, and combine it with other information assets – while almost one-third already to so.

The need is clear, but the technology is just now catching up.  While document and content management solution providers have already begun introducing related capabilities, the BI tool vendors are frantically trying to rush to market with applications that can locate and pull data from Web 2.0-based sources.  What the future holds remains to be seen.

Web 2.0: How Will It Impact Business Intelligence?

Web 2.0 is an up-and-coming trend in Web design and development, and more and more companies are beginning to embrace it in order to leverage the full potential of the Internet.  Web 2.0 uses communities, hosted services, and other shared Internet resources to facilitate faster and broader information exchange both inside and outside the enterprise.  Through the use of advanced programming frameworks and technologies like Web services, JavaScript, and AJAX, as well as social networking sites and other communication venues, Web 2.0 enables a virtually unlimited range of Internet collaboration capabilities.

Many industry experts see Web 2.0 as the next revolution in business intelligence, and expect it to transform reporting processes in ways that few technologies and methodologies have been able to in the past.  Gone will be the days of information access and analysis that was limited by the constraints of internal data and traditional back-end systems.  Instead, a new era of BI will emerge, one that allows users to supplement internal information with data from a vast array of external sources like blogs, wikis, and RSS feeds.

So, what will be some of the best ways to apply Web 2.0 techniques to BI environments? Web 2.0 will most impact business intelligence via its ability to allow companies to create more rich Internet applications for reporting and analysis.  With Web 2.0-enabled reporting environments, users of any kind – even non-technical users – can access and interact with information with almost no boundaries.

For example: 

• Use of wikis, blogs, and other collaborative workspaces will allow users to instantly publish and share reports and other critical business content. 
• Incorporation of RSS feeds into data marts and warehouses will serve as an additional information source in reports and analyses, providing an endless stream of real-time information.
• Development of BI environments using advanced Internet frameworks will accelerate deployment, improve system performance, enhance robustness of the user interface, increase speed of data delivery, and ease integration with other business applications.
• Combining BI with various external sources – through use of mashups – will expand the depth and breadth of the corporate information that already exists.  Mashups can also be utilized to enable rapid creation of composite BI services. 
• Use of “tagging” techniques will make reporting content available and easy to find over “everyday” Web sites such as Yahoo and Google.  This will facilitate collaboration with customers and external business partners.

With Web 2.0, organizations can improve all facets of their business intelligence environments.  The technical benefits are just the beginning.  Access to, interaction with, and sharing of vast amounts of vital and timely data will be significantly increased, and as a result, the end user experience – and the value that BI can add to the business – will be dramatically enhanced.