Social Data Analytic Platform - Capabilities Pt. 1

There are many vendors in the social data analytic platform (SDAP) space. Each brings a somewhat unique set of features and functions to the game. Early entrants have been focused primarily on the needs of marketing and public relations teams and often focused on only monitoring the social landscape. As a company's social data analytics strategy evolves from "watching" to a more widely integrated approach a new set of capabilities is required to meet the needs of enterprise users. Platform functionality will enable a wide range of analytic and functional capabilities so its important to make sure the solution you choose for your company has the platform functionality required to support action, collaboration, integration with enterprise data and applications and can support advanced analytic functions.

Platform Functions

Alerting and Workflow - Social Data Analytic Platforms are gaining traction within enterprise companies and its critical as more stakeholders become involved that the platform help these professionals to understand the insights that are critical to their company and take faster action. Alerting and key performance indicator (KPI) driven metrics have long been included in traditional business intelligence solutions and they are now finding their way into SDAP solutions. Receiving an email alert or text message is a useful way to interact with social data insights but its even more successful if the platform combines alerts with workflow functionality that allows users to design business process functions based on the alerts or for alerts to automatically kick off processes based on thresholds and KPI's.

Collaboration - As much as KPI's and Alerts help users to take action; collaboration is a key function to adding value to workflows and decisions. Most vendors in the social data analytic space are still struggling to provide highly useful collaborative capabilities. As with traditional business intelligence bringing a diverse set of skills and insights to a business problem will most often result in a better decision for the company overall this is true with social workflows and decisions. 

Integration / API's - SDAP solutions can't impact the enterprise unless they can be highly and seamlessly integrated with existing analytic platforms and data sources. Many leading business intelligence vendors are incorporating social data analytic capabilities into their BI platforms as a strategy to bring the data and the decision making to a single integrated platform.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) - NLP combines linguistics and artificial intelligence (AI) to enable computers to understand human or natural language input. The business value of NLP is probably obvious. Social data is often information directly created by human input and this data is unstructured in nature making it nearly impossible to leverage with standard SQL. NLP can make sense of the unstructured data that is produced by social data sources and help to organize it into a more sturcutred model to support SQL based queries. NLP opens the door for sophisticated analysis of social data and supports text data mining and other sophisticated analytic functions.

These four platform function areas are key foundations for the analytic insights most companies will need to leverage with thier social data analytic platform. Alerting, Workflows, Collaboration, integration and API's and natural Language processing engines are important building blocks for strong platforms that strive to support enterprise class needs.

Look at part 2 of this post for details on the type of analytic functions that will help deliver success with social data.

Push Intelligence

I'm not generally a big fan of new industry acronyms or buzz words. But I have to say I like the term Push Intelligence. It characterizes the value proposition of these type of solutions pretty well.

A leader in this space is Metric Insights. They deliver a platform that starts on the alert end of BI instead of the hunt and search side that many solutions employ. The environment is Key Performance Indicator (KPI) oriented, pushing dashboards and reports to the end user that require attention and skipping the ones that don't. The platform goes a step further in that it offers collaborative features that allow stakeholders to annotate charts to add greater context to the data presented. 

Metric Insights is architected to make embedding easy so companies who need sophisticated alerting and collaborative features can add the solution to their BI strategy. The solution is value priced and integrates well with 100's of data sources including Hadoop. MongoDB and Cassandra.

SAP launches 12Sprints for Collaborative Decision Making

SAP has launched its rival to Google Wave called 12Sprints. It's a platform for collaborative decision making and offers many of the functions you might expect from this type of platform. In many ways it mimics what Google Wave delivers but is more structured and perhaps better tailored for enterprise use. Here is a short intro video that covers the high points.

The tool is a good start but is more project oriented than anything. My concern is that its a standalone application that will require the business users to step out of their normal work flow and step into an application they will have to learn. Adoption would be greatly enhanced if they could weave the application features into the normal decision work flow.

More importantly, I'd like to see them integrate it seamlessly with the enterprise business intelligence layer. Allowing teams to bring in dynamic business data. The only outside information that can be imported into the platform is a manual process and seems to be limited to PDF, Images and Excel....yuck. Without access to the rich, deep and real-time enterprise information this platform won't really help you solve much. lastly the program relies too heavily on email. It needs a more instant IM based communication layer. To quote Bill French "Email is where knowledge goes to die" Real-time communication is critical.

I commend SAP for starting down this road and I hope to see them add real power to the platform in the future.

Update on Friday, February 19, 2010 at 10:44AM by Shawn Rogers

I attended a briefing with SAP today and got more info on 12Sprints and the good news is they see things not to far off from my initial review. More improvements are coming, what you see today is a public beta. The good news is that they are going to enhance the enterprise data access and freshness of data issues. Sorry NDA stops me from going into greater details. (I hate NDA's)

How do you establish a meritocracy in a highly dispersed environment?

The title of my post today is a quote from the New Your Times interview with SunGard President and C.E.O Cristóbal Conde titled Structure? The Flatter, the Better by Adam Bryant . The idea of flattening your organization and introducing platforms and cultures that spawn creativity and innovation through coolaboration and social networking tools hits me right where I live! He made many good points throughout the interview but his focus on collaboration was the most noteworthy.

Mr. Conde praised the social platform Yammer for opening up the conversations within his company on a global basis and allowing his teams to share ideas.

I think that a C.E.O. needs to focus more on the platform that enables collaboration, because employees already have all the data. They have access to everything. You have to work on the structure of collaboration.    -Cristóbal Conde

On Monday I talked about the evolution of the Social Business and focused on the Project Greenlight effect of managers using social and coolaborative platfrom to surface innovation and to act like movie producers green lighting the best of the best ideas it seems the Mr. Conde sees things in a similar light.

I think the role of the boss is to then work on those collaboration platforms, as opposed to being the one making the decisions. It’s more like the producer of the show, rather than being the lead.   -Cristóbal Conde

Congratulations to Mr. Conde for seeing the upside of structured social networking within the enterprise to drive his company forward.