I just returned from a Business Intelligence (BI) industry conference where everyone was talking about how to make BI pervasive. That is, "how do we get every employee to be a user of reports, dashboards, and analytics?"
You don't. For 2 reasons.
There are actually very few product categories in the world that can expect to be needed by everyone. There are people who do not need a car, a mortgage, a gun, a college education, a smart phone, a telescope, etc. Similarly, there are people (many of them) who do not actually need BI stuff. Sure, BI will grow from its current low penetration -- but, let's be realistic and set the bar lower than "everyone's a BI user."
Also, you've got the wrong pronoun. We the technology/solutions/services providers will never have the time, influence, credibility, or relevant experience to connect with all the potential users of BI reporting and analytics. The direct strategy is a dead-end. We have to take the indirect path: equip and recruit influential BI users to build their own user bases. In other words, we have to use a channel strategy within the organization, just as we often use a channel strategy externally to reach hard-to-reach market segments. To do this, we have to enable interested BI users to create a personal brand, to promote their info-wares to downstream subscribers. This requires that we reconsider the boundaries of BI: it is not just ETL, warehousing, query, and formatting. We must make BI integral with everything required to facilitate users creating their own info-brands, which certainly includes (but is not limited to) social media, widgets, search, collaboration, etc. Then they will promote the consumption of BI info, albeit not necessarily in a form that we would recognize as such today.
The useful question is not "how do we dumb down BI tools and sell them to everyone?" but "how do we turn core users into channels to reach peripheral prospective users?"
It's not about the tech. It's about people and relationships. It always has been.
Comments