Imagine being able to help your executive team anticipate and address hotspots in your business, spending less time chasing data and building reports and more time measuring the precise aspects that matter most to you; collaborating online with communities of experts (colleagues, customers, suppliers); discovering insights that allow you to improve profitability, capitalize on growth opportunites and innovate faster! Now you can do this quickly, cost-effectively and without burdening IT. This is the New BI – an emerging paradigm for analytics designed around the way people really work, share information and make decisions. All powered by solutions from PivotLink and PivotLink partners.
The New BI is in the cloud and benefits from the inherent advantages of this computing model (affordable, agile, quickly deployable, high bandwidth, “always on”, extend more kinds of data to more users). Most importantly, the New BI isn’t shackled behind the four walls of an organization. It goes well beyond and helps individuals extend their network far and fast enough to get timely insights and answers to their operational and strategic questions. The New BI goes beyond analysis and reporting and ventures into the realm of true collaborative decision making. Web 2.0 social tools wrapped around the New BI have the ability to quickly collect and spread knowledge, connect people who would otherwise have remained unaware of each other, harness their collective intelligence and enhance individual decision making.
Three key forces are driving the trend towards the New BI: 1) the explosion of more and various types of information in our day-to-day work lives, 2) a new generation of digitally savvy employees and 3) a blurring of the distinction between technology used in our personal and our work lives. With dynamic flows of information coming at them each day, users need new ways to access and analyze it and then relate it to their decisions and actions. Secondly, those who grew up with personal technology – Millenials, Gen Y – are changing the culture of the workforce. The emerging workforce prefers information in multimedia to words, the collective intelligence of individuals and they rely upon online resources such as social networks, expert communities and bloggers for strategic information. As people become increasingly used to sharing and collaborating outside the office (e.g. Facebook, iPhone, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube) they are coming to expect their work places to become more open and collaborative as well. Many companies today are organized into separate regional product-line and functional “silos”, making it hard for people to share information beyond their immediate colleagues. As a result valuable information and insight ends up being siloed or simply not shared. Even worse, opportunities for innovation don’t surface.
The New BI enables organizations to leverage information in valuable new ways including connecting employees who need information with the experts who have it, enabling the best ideas to emerge organically and using those ideas to catalyze innovation. As the New BI gains traction, it will transform the way companies organize and manage their information assets and ultimately empower individuals to re-design their decision making processes to make not only more timely decisions, but more confident and creative ones.
At PivotLink we give business people tools that allow them to access, aggregate and analyze the information they need to improve understanding and decision making and ultimately do their jobs better – without burdening IT. PivotLink customers such as the North Face, DMA and OrderMotion have already had success with the New BI to speed up knowledge-sharing both internally and across the extended supply chain, in turn breaking down silos. The New BI is a more efficient and effective business intelligence paradigm. It is positioned to help users know more, do better and thrive. Stay tuned, it’s about to get really interesting !
