Cyril on Business Intelligence

Tagging and Social Book-marking for BI applications is a hot topic. See, for example, Bill Ives comment. But I think there are barriers to it’s success in the corporate context. It doesn’t lend itself easily to the dynamics that are, or should be, key aspects of BI system design.

Sure, I am completely in agreement that information, particularly soft information, needs to be tagged, or classified, before it can be useful. I’ve talked about this several times in this blog. Social book-marking is better than none.

If information isn’t categorized then it cannot be selectively disseminate or easily searched for.

The social book-marking ethos implies that people create their own tags. But, of course, no one else knows (at least knows in a short time frame) that this tag is being applied for this purpose.

Until the tag’s existence and meaning is widely known, no item of, say, competitive intelligence with this tag can be subject to targeted personalization to relevant decision makers. More importantly, if the tag describes a concept that is identical to, or nearly so, those linked to one or more other tags then confusion is likely.

It follows that social book-marking can be effective in information retrieval, if the tags are managed, moderated and disseminated. However, this approach is not likely to be valuable for alerting purposes, especially in dynamic business environments. This is because those being alerted will not know of the tags existence, and will be frustrated by multiple tags with the same meaning.

In any case, corporate wide management of social bookmark tags is always going to be a big ask.

Knowledge in a business is often created via group collaboration. The smart corporation enables such new knowledge to be disseminated rapidly to those who should know it, and can take requisite action. There is no time to create new tags that may be redundant anyway, and to disseminate their existence and meaning widely.

Business intelligence has two basic purposes:

1. Helping executives and professionals assess status and find problems

2. Supporting problem solving, usually by less senior staff

For the corporate BI context the alerting and problem finding objectives are usually more valuable than problem solving. Knowing an issue exists will often be absolutely critical, resolving it is usually less difficult and less important. We cannot solve problems we don’t know exist.

As I opined recently, it is the combination of subject matter and assessed importance that is the key to effective alerting, or selective dissemination. And if an executive is to have a personalization profile it must use tags that are pre-specified and whose meaning is understood widely. Social book-marking does not usually imply assessing importance. Often importance can only be determined by people outside the group that creates the information, and the tag.

In the BI context a corporate vocabulary of preferred terms will be more useful than various sets of personally created, and probably redundant, social bookmarks. This is because the standard terms are widely known. Further, they are usually grouped in hierarchies of broader and narrower concepts and this facilitates retrieval and alerting.

 

Executives can seek items of high importance that are classified by a broader term (say, overall gross margin issues), or those about a narrower term (say, product X gross margin) that are of lower importance. In either case, they will not be inundated with large numbers of items.

Of course, inside a project team and other tightly knit groups social bookmarks may be suitable ways to tag documents and other material for retrieval.

However, I don’t believe that the wider corporate environment will benefit to the same extent. It’s a case where more formality and discipline brings better results.