Business Intelligence Trumps Facebook

 

In 2010, organizations recognized the enormous, valuable data resource social networking had unleashed.

In 2011, they expect to take stock of this resource, making sure their analytics fall into line. The development of social networking and collaboration applications for the enterprise will continue: Roughly 30 percent of the organizations we surveyed expect new or increased deployment of each in 2011.

But the enthusiasm is for business analytics and knowledge management, where nearly two-thirds of new commitments are expected to be at a strong or very strong level.

Business intelligence (BI) systems are likely to see deployment growth: Our survey showed about 9 percent more organizations expecting significant deployments in 2011, compared with last year?s survey. And it?s high on end-users? and finance?s wish lists. The driver of this interest seems to be the need to corral all these new, usually disorganized information sources.

?Some social networking techniques will clearly impact all users, and deployments will continue at their own pace —  independent of corporate intent,? says Bill Bosler, CIO at Texas Consultants, which recently designed an ambitious BI tool as part of a new oil refinery project in the Middle East. ?There will be plenty of action on the analytics side, crunching all the new real-time data collected by both new and traditional means, and anticipating and mitigating challenges before they occur.?