Understanding Social BI

Social BI: Topic sounds interesting, isn't ? Lets discover this a bit. The idea of this blog is to understand what Social BI is and how corporates can feast on its power.

The term social networking would certainly make you think the way you are connected and contributing to this rising market.Why it is rising , lets check out the numbers involved in this. Till last month Facebook had over 800 Million users( indeed a whopping figure) and Google+ crossed 50 Million mark in short time. These are leaders, however there are many more which are more regional. The best part is these are growing exponentially. Not to forget numerous countess twitters, blogs etc. As per Pew research on usage: about 83 % of youth for age group of 18 to 29 yrs which almost doubled in last 2-3 years and to me more interesting is 50-64 yrs bracket with a growing rate of over 1000 times. You can very well make out that the numbers involved are huge and power driven by these numbers would be enormous too. From another dimension , we can look this as mammoth CRM system, where data is maintained by users themselves.

Now, lets understand the usage of Social networking media from different perspective. Most of us use it for entertainment, collaboration, connection , sharing, learning and for many other things. Basically what is been happening is we say or follow something , somewhere and somehow. Please note, this in totality generates  huge data.  This means opportunities to know in terms of what is going on in society or what is the sentiment right now. Just imagine, if we are assisted with some powerful tool, then we can easily analyse this sentiment and have business/marketing strategy tuned, if we are part of corporate. Have personal strategy defined being an individual and have political strategy in case of Govt. The potential is huge , very huge. To provide other side of it , in recent times we have experienced several incidents/causes all around globe which were driven by social media and at many places where Social Networking acted as Saviour, specially during Japan earth quake crisis and Irene Hurricane. 

Now we know the source of this data, however tapping it has its own challenges. Firstly there is no direct access , secondly the data quality. There are various tools and solutions available which we will talk about in later section. Firstly lets see how organizations / individuals can feast on this.

Out of above ,lets see one usage from Business perspective with market leader ( Facebook) . I believe , any Global organization, can easily comment Its the Facebook where the customers are :). To unleash this power, corporate are using three following ways;

1. By creating Fan Pages
2. Doing Target Messaging 
3. Creating applications.

Fan pages build ongoing dialogs, target messages helps with limited target advertisement however both are very much limited. However the third option delivers rich interactivity in terms of bringing targeted , personalized and relevant content directly to consumers. For example,  just think of receiving discount coupons, loyalty perks, special offers and services from your favourite coffee brand.( I would certainly like to get some of these from Starbucks ;)). The steps involved are , users installs the facebook application and commits to share data(comprising of Demographics,behaviours, likes and friends etc) to application owner for various purpose as mentioned in agreement. Consumer intelligence is carried out on application users data .Organization do data mining , come up with marketing strategies/ campaigns and its go on and on.

Above looks great and simple. For sure, however everything comes with a cost tag. Firstly one needs to have proper tools to have access of data by using permission tokens and provision to enriching this from demographics perspective as  many of the users don't fill out complete information e.g. town name is mentioned without state and there can be many towns with same name  , the siblings are incorrect etc. There are many tools available in market , however please mind that these are still evolving. To name a few Microstrategy ( wisdom and Gateway ) , Antivia, Lyza , Panarama Necto etc. Secondly the organization is able to understand the market trend by doing proper data mining and align this with marketing startegy. Thirdly get the feedback and keep on improving ..

My recommendations:

1.  Social Media/Networking is evolving and it indeed offers tremendous potential for Corporates , Individuals, Govt. sector to carry out consumer analysis, sentiment analysis etc. BI professional needs to understand the influence on BI.
2. Data is huge and growing , however the Data quality is of concern.
3. Tools are evolving as the market is . Few big and small vendors are already making their presence felt . Many more Heavy weights vendors are coming in or planning to come in join this growing market. Have a close watch on upcoming tools.
4. Individuals need to understand the data share agreement with application provider.
   Hope you all enjoyed this.

I plan to cover another important aspect of Social Bi(Sentiment analysis) and text analytics some time later.. 

Can BI projects be offshored and delivered successfully?

Recently I was hearing to thoughts of Krish Krishnan , who is renowned industry in strategy architecture and implementation of high performance DWH solutions. It was quite an interesting session as we all know that many of the BI projects stalls due to numerous reasons.I would not repeat the whole talk as transcript as you can refer to same in TDWI webinar section( Managing risks of offshore Data warehousing). I would provide some gems and end it with my experience managing such like engagements.

Krish made a very important point that DWH program is special and is unlike other software projects, how,

1. Its an evolving program because of ever increasing demand of business requirements. None of enterprise who have implemented DWH /BI solution can confirm that the in place DWH system/s doesn't need any changes. All are experiencing some changes happening at some point of time, be it on Reporting layer or Integration layer.


2. Its a very complex Program as it involves complex technology , multiple stakeholders, multiple SMEs, multiple applications, and ongoing development. Bringing all under one roof is indeed challenging.

In order to have successful off-shoring there are various critical factors(people, process and organization) which need to be taken care by project owner. First two are obvious, however I was interested to find organization , and that surely made sense to me in order to transfer risk ( for data , multiple locations etc) and exploiting cost( blended cost) and talent and proven process advantages one needs to put this as important factor too. All the above points are based on work balance between offshore and onsite as any imbalance can lead to risk of ownership issue, communication issues availability of resources etc which can be devastating. I feel , Krish was very particular about management of communication & expectations effectively.

To summarize: I feel most of things are common Project management chores except for complexities of collaboration and evolution of DWH with in and outside enterprise/s. For sure there is no silver bullet which fits all . There is a need to be patient to achieve the right maturity levels. based on my experience ,I have following points to offer.

1. At onsite, the program should have Right set of people to understand and manage stakeholders expectations( technical, political, ego , cultural etc). And offshore owners must be imparted this very knowledge seamlessly else the program would not be in one world, rather two , simultaneously coexisting with each other which never meet.


2. Its best to have single Program Manager not like a usual onsite and offshore owners. I feel puts additional overhead and delays decision as both onsite and offshore reports to one who is managing multiple such like programs , and its obvious that there would be some conflicts.


3. Focus on mix of team at onsite , this is very important when it comes to manage global, co located project have diverse cultures.


4. If working on newer technologies, please plan accordingly as this could be a tipping point.


5. Try to retain core team members if not possible, insist to have effective Knowledge transfer. I feel usually 80% of the tacit knowledge is gone waste whenever there is turn around.


6. If possible , arrange for onsite visit for all key offshore members and vice versa. This needs to planned smartly.

Cheers!