Mike Ferguson (@mikeferguson1), an independent business intelligence analyst, recently Tweeted “Collaborative BI and Mobile BI are a no brainer…you have to be able to collaborate with others to act on BI from a mobile device.”
It seems Ferguson’s assumption is a hot topic in the BI space today. For instance, Wayne Kernochan breaks down the widely quoted Gartner statistic that 70 to 80 percent of projects fail to be all about collaboration in a recent Enterprise Apps Today article.
His premise is that the collaboration has to occur not just at the top levels of IT and business, but at the developer and data miner level. Kernochan’s article surmises that all three opinions in the article – his own, the Gartner analyst’s and industry consultant Jill Dyche’s (@jilldyche) – lead to the same conclusion, “There needs to be effective communication between the business with its needs and the computing arm that attempts to respond to those needs.”
In order for collaboration to occur, user adoption has to lead the charge and training has to be a central focus. For instance, in IDC’s Pervasive BI study, extending BI to “all decision makers, be they executives or staff employees, managers or suppliers…means much more than distributing reports to all stakeholders.” IDC’s vice president of business analytics research Dan Vesset (@danvesset), placed the degree of training and non-executive involvement in the top five factors with the greatest influence on BI pervasiveness.
And, these factors extend to the growing demand for mobile BI. Lyndsay Wise (@wiseanalytics) recently wrote in a blog, Mobile BI is slowly becoming the first choice of business intelligence users. Not only do people enjoy interacting with mobile devices, they enable continual access to information and potential collaboration.”
Additionally, Wise suggests that the increase of tablet usage will increase BI adoptions and extend its use to more employees.
These remarks and studies show that there is a direct correlation between user adoption, user collaboration and ease-of-use in BI implementation success. In order to increase the user adoption and social BI, we feel training is essential.
Next Steps
- Watch for more posts on the importance of training in BI and data analytics in the coming weeks or receive an email alert by subscribing to our blog.
- View our recent on-demand webcast “Educational Awareness Session: Driving Spotfire User Adoption in 2011”.
Amanda Brandon
Spotfire Blogging Team
