Oz Analytics

Social Networking and BI

I was sent a link to a presentation on social media and BI by US/Indian company erada. They specialize in developing solutions that work in a SAP environment.

In the presentation they quote Gartner and their recent (February 2009) survey of 1,400 CEO's who reported that they did not achieve BVA (Business Value Attainment) in their BI investments  What's really interesting is that less than 9 % reached their desired BVA when they went live. BVA is broadly a measure for stakeholders of whether-or-not a good investment has been made.

What is not clear from the Gartner analysis that I have seen is why you would expect to see instant return on your investment. If you buy a truck for your company you expect it to earn a solid return for you over the future years - not instantly the day you buy it. Isn't this the same for BI (and any other software) investment. Or am I missing something?

I suspect Gartner is trying to measure the perception that CEOs have of what they are getting at launch versus what they expected to get (based on promises) when the BI investment decision was made.

This is an important point and I myself go to great lengths not to over promise to stakeholders. It's also not necessary to do so as the benefits of the BI investments (at least where I have worked) are simply massive. The trick is to use language your stakeholders understand. Delivering value also helps ...

Here is a copy of the presentation. Persist with the way the slides are built as there is some good information to learn:

Social Network BI-Outside In_sept09

I like the slide pictured above as they make a good point that just churning out reports each day does not deliver insight.

I also like the sound of their SmartCube product that (according to their website blurb) "helps in redesigning the SAP InfoCube to reduce query time, load time and footprint on BIA." Anything that helps InfoCube work faster gets my vote!.

How We Spend Our Day

The New York Times has just published an interesting analysis of the latest American Time Use Survey. This survey asks thousands of American residents to recall every minute of their day. Here is how people over age 15 spent their time in 2008:

This interactive graphic has been created by Shan Carter, Amanda Cox, Kevin Quealy and Amy Schoenfeld using data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Click on the image for a larger version or visit the original here.

It is a fascinating glimpse into how we all spend our time and worth 5 minutes of your day to explore.

From what I can see, the US population, on average, spends at most only 14 minutes online outside of their work (6 minutes gaming [12 percent of their time spent on 'Other leisure'] and 8 minutes using the computer). How can this be? The figure for work is only 3 hours and 25 minutes - reflecting the number of people without 'official' jobs.

I can only conclude that the way I spend my time is absolutely out of whack as I spend a couple of hours on the computer outside of work. I think maybe I need to get a life. Does anyone have the contact number for CAOA (Computer Addicts Of Australia)?

Top 6 BI Social Network Organisations

Just published is a new survey of social networking by Wetpaint and Altimeter Group. The result is called the ENGAGEMENTdb. The survey is designed to answer the question: 

What companies are on the social web and how well are they doing it?

ENGAGEMENTdb ranks the world's most valuable brands. these are the brands identified in the separate survey by BusinessWeek / Interbrand called "Best Global Brands 2008".  ENGAGEMENTdb goes on to rank how they leverage social media to interact with customers. It is a great piece of work.

Success varies greatly by industry as shown by the picture on the left.

I thought it would be interesting to mine the survey and take a look at how the business intelligence vendors/ participants performed:

Position	Organisation	# of Channels	Score	Place in Top 100
1	Google	11	105	4
2	Microsoft	10	103	5
3	SAP	10	86	9
4	Oracle	10	73	14
5	HP	8	50	24
6	IBM	9	46	28

 

I also include two other organisations: Reuters because of their extensive textual data mining activities like factiva; and Accenture due to their sizable global BI practice. If they were included in the above list, then they would rank as follows:

Position	Organisation	# of Channels	Score	Place in Top 100
3	Thomson Reuters	11	101	6
4	Accenture	10	76	13

 

Overall, the IT firms have greatly varied performances as shown by the figure to the left. All of the business intelligence vendors perform in the top quartile of the top 100.

The ENGAGEMENTdb has a lot to say about all of these organisations. I took a closer look at SAPs Social Profile and (with a little extra digging) you learn that:

Its core social presence is the SCN (SAP Community Network ) that has 1.7 million registered users and has within it four distinct communities:

• SDN - SAP Developer Network for SAP NetWeaver. Contains technical articles, white papers, and how-to guides, as well as some 200 moderated forums, expert blogs, software downloads, extensive eLearning materials, and a Wiki that supports open communication.
• SBX - Business Process Expert Community. Contains articles, white papers, how-to guides, forums, blogs, and Wiki, as well as virtual events and eLearning. You'll also find up-to-date strategic information on business processes and the software solutions that support them.
• BusinessObjects - SAP Business Objects Community. Contains forums and articles that reinforce the value of open and heterogeneous Business Objects solutions, leveraging technologies from SAP, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and more. You'll also have access to software downloads for Crystal Reports and Xcelcius.
• SAP EcoHub - SAP Application Partner Solutions. A knowledgebase.

Other communities are operated by SAP and they include the SAP Community Network 2.0 (beta).

SAP also is active through a number of independent communities such as BOB (BusinessObjects Board http://www.forumtopics.com/busobj/index.php) with 42,000 registered users.

Apart from the shear size of the network, the quality of the communities activities impress. Perhaps this is because of the following:

• The network is open to anyone who wants to post, blog or comment. SCN has over 5,000 bloggers now. Contributions to the SCN are encouraged by rewarded by points for participation that contribute to your reputation.
• Employees are encouraged to participate. 1,500 of the 5,000 SCN bloggers are SAP employees.
• New channels are embraced as they become popular. SAP uses Twitter for example.
• Actively reaching out to customers. Twitter.com/saplistens http://www.Twitter.com/saplistens is a twitter account whose purpose is to get feedback from customers.

Checkout the ENGAGEMENTdb website or read the whole report here: 

Download ENGAGEMENTdb_Report_2009

Social Networking Guidelines

Further to my last blog on creating an über social network, I have been looking at corporate policies on social networking by employees. It's interesting reading.

Associated Press has a policy that seems particularly poorly thought out. The policy requires AP employees using Facebook to “monitor your profile page to make sure material posted by others doesn’t violate AP standards: any such material should be deleted.”

So AP employees are responsible for any comments posted by their friends to pictures or links on their profiles. Wow.

Download AP's social networking policy.

Luckily more reasoned and fair policies are more prevalent and here are a couple of good examples from the analytics world. Take a look at IBM's policy and SAP's:

Download SAP's 2009 social media participation guidelines.

Here's an 8 minute video from Microsoft social networking. It has a fair bit of sales talk on how their technology helps but watch it for the discussion on corporate guidelines:

Creating The Uber Social Network

I am currently working on developing new media strategies with a number of organisations. For a couple of them we are trying to create a single online conversation with the customer - combining Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, ning, forums and a hundred other social networks. The aim is to create a virtual 'über' social network so that all of the individuals interested in an organisation can interact regardless of the specific social network they prefer to use.

An example may help to illustrate what we are looking for: I write this blog and it is syndicated to a number of other channels such as the SmartData Collective and the Business Intelligence CORTEX. Some people will comment on the blog itself using the comment link under each entry. Others may comment on the CORTEX. This is good as far as it goes but if you comment on the CORTEX and I on the SmartData Collective - we may never know of each other's comments. This is a missed opportunity. I want to link all of the channels to each other - automatically.

This is easier said than done and is one of the core goals of the Semantic Web (also known as web 2.0). I posted a short comment what I want to do on my LinkedIn account and a couple of people (thanks to Patrick and Rajasekar) suggested the following links that I have found useful - and I add a couple of my own:

• GizaPage - "GizaPage is a social network organizer that helps consumers and brands manage their online presence by consolidating their many social networking profiles side by side under a personalized URL."
• OpenSocial - "Friends are fun, but they're only on some websites. OpenSocial helps these sites share their social data with the web. Applications that use the OpenSocial APIs can be embedded within a social network itself, or access a site's social data from anywhere on the web."  
• FOAF - "an acronym of Friend of a friend is a machine-readable ontology describing persons, their activities and their relations to other people and objects. Anyone can use FOAF to describe him or herself. FOAF allows groups of people to describe social networks without the need for a centralised database." 
• Go2Web20.net - a web2.0 directory service, currently listing over 2,700 services. 

My investigations continue and I will blog about the results as they happen. Contact me if you have any ideas ...

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Why Would I Ever Tweet?

I recently came across this great venn diagram describing the social networking community:

Social Media: Unlocking the Awesome Potential of Behavioral Disorders

This was created by the equally great team at Despair Inc. What makes the diagram great is that there is an element of truth in it.

I have only very recently begun to tweet because up until now I didn't get why I should. I have email, a blog and the CORTEX online community to keep me 'connected'. What more is worth doing I thought. Many friends and colleagues were already tweeting, so I decided to take a closer look. My first step, after familiarising myself with the basics of the twitter service and related programs (like TwitterTrend, Twitterfon and Socialtoo), was to do some data mining. I discovered a 'hidden' part of the Twitter service where I could search twitter. Try it for yourself here.

So now I had a way of mining tweets in almost realtime. This is useful as it taps you into a more casual set of discussions/observations - less formal than say blogging, but available to read - unlike email not sent to you.

So if someone wonders why Twitter is useful here are a couple of (in my opinion) valid answers why:

• You can monitor or participate in a more immediate social conversation than blogs or forums allow.
• It extends an email-like information exchange between people that would otherwise not email each other. 
• You can let people know about events quicker than via email as the 140 character messages are more compact and therefor easier to monitor on your mobile device.

It's not all roses because it also means:

• Another channel to monitor and respond to. 
• Your fellow tweeters often tweet about things you don't want to know about. Yes, I do want to know if you discover a fantastic new analytic. No, I don't (always) want to know what you had for lunch!

So today, I'm not tweeting many times a day but I am:

• Monitoring the twitter community for talk about business intelligence, analytics, data warehousing and performance management.
• Following many interesting people and organisations in the same space. 
• Tweeting (automatically) so people know when I blog. 
• Tweeting very occasionally when I think other people would like to know about something - and it can't wait for my next blog or CORTEX post.

Oh, and if you're wondering, I had a ham and tomato roll for lunch today!