Collaborative BI

Collaborative BI:
Theory Becomes
Reality
Claudia Imhoff and Colin White

Claudia Imhoff, Ph.D., is the president and

founder of Intelligent Solutions, a leading
consultancy on data warehousing and business
intelligence technologies and strategies.
She is a TDWI Fellow and an associate
editor of the Business Intelligence Journal.
She is a popular speaker and internationally
recognized expert, and has co-authored
five books and more than 100 articles for
technical and business magazines.
www.intelsols.com | www.boulderbibraintrust.org

Colin White is the founder and president of BI

Research. He is well known for his in-depth
knowledge of business intelligence, data
management, and data integration technologies
and how they can be used for supporting
agile decision making. With many years of
IT experience, he has consulted for dozens of
companies throughout the world and is a frequent
speaker at leading IT events and a regular
contributor to several leading industry journals.
cwhite@bi-research.com

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In a previous article about the combination of collaboration and BI (Imhoff and White, 2010), we discussed
the need for collaborative BI, the types of information
workers who use it, and their basic collaboration requirements. It has been three years since we published that
article; today, collaborative BI is not only a reality but
also a mandatory part of your BI environment.
In this update, we describe the technical requirements
and how BI and collaborative technologies support them.
We also present examples of collaborative BI technology
that demonstrate what each architectural component
contributes to collaboration. Finally, we end with a
practical section on the best practices learned so far.

Collaborative BI Technical Requirements

In studying vendor offerings and client implementations,
we have determined that collaborative BI consists of three
technical requirements:
1. Collaborative interaction. Business people interact with
each other to improve overall communication and gain
better insight into unfolding situations. They need to
easily discover the available BI analytics and just as
easily share the analysis with their teams. Finally, they
need to discuss the meaning of the analytics, their
validity to the situation, and the available decision
options to improve, reduce, or maintain future analytic
indicators. This ease of discovery and the recording of
ensuing discussions have become significant features of
highly collaborative BI environments.
2. Information enhancement. The BI results alone are not
enough. Often, an explanation of what the result or
trend means is necessary for full comprehension. To
get this information enhancement, business people

Collaborative BI

Master data
store

Data
warehouse

Operational BI

Discover
Access
Integrate
Manage

Workgroup
data

Analyze
Publish

Collaborate

Decide
Act

Other data
sources
Enhance

Interact

Decide

Figure 1: Collaborative BI and the information supply chain.

must be able to add their own knowledge to the BI

results. They can provide information about what is
causing events to unfold the way they are, discover
related content, and provide the necessary business
context surrounding the BI results. For example, a
trend may be heading upward. Is this good news or
bad? Adding team expertise and knowledge about the
trend makes it clear that the trend is goodcustomer
satisfaction is higher than it was at the same time last
year. Published BI results can be enhanced through
feedback mechanisms such as ratings, comments, and
tagging, and in some cases, blogs and microblogs.
3. Collaborative decision making. The last step, of course,
is to choose the appropriate action(s) to take based on
the two previous activities. A fully collaborative BI
environment means the organization can track these
decisions and analyze their accuracy or impact on the
situation or event. This analysis produces feedback
to the teams in terms of how they can improve the
entire process. It enables best practices to be identified
and codified while allowing information workers to
track the types of information that provide the most
useful content for decision making. Collaborative
decision making should also include analysis of the
enterprises social networks and other informal teams
to determine influencers of communities, who has
needed expertise, and who makes the decisions in
these informal networks.

Business intelligence and collaboration work together as

shown in Figure 1. The first two boxes depict a BI and
data warehousing workflow. You could store the BI results
from this workflow in some form of workgroup data store
for use by collaborating users, or they could be published
directly into a collaborative workflow.
The BI and data warehousing workflow includes a discover activity. Many information discovery tools employ
search capabilities to uncover information from anywhere
in an information supply chain. The ease with which
an information worker can find BI assets is a significant
factor in the success of the overall environment.
The collaborative workflow is represented in the rightmost
two boxes in Figure 1. These activities support the three
main features of collaborative BI outlined earlier: collaborative interaction (interact), information enhancement
(enhance), and collaborative decision making (decide).

Collaborative BI Technologies
Collaborative BI implementations can use many
technologies that allow information workers to share
and interact with BI results. Figure 2 provides a sample
of these technologies and shows which of the three
requirements of collaborative BI they support. Several of
these technologies are not just for collaborative BI (see
square brackets), but they are certainly useful in this
area. For example, search and Web browsing are used
for many non-BI purposes, but they are also quite good

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Collaborative BI

E-mail and instant messaging

Voice and text messaging (including online chat)
Conferencing and webcasting
Information portal and mobile computing
[Content management software]
[Search, Web browsing, and bookmarking]
[Wikis]

Interact

Information collections, tagging, and folksonomies

Ratings and comments
Blogs and microblogs

Enhance

Communities (team sites, social networks)

Profiles (personal, subject matter experts)
Social network analysis
Business process integration
Decision making techniques and methodologies
Decision tracking and analysis

Decide

Figure 2: Collaborative technologies.

for discovering information for decision making. Mobile

devices are good for collaborating on many fronts, including BI. They make sharing and interacting with BI results
easy and attractive.
It should come as no surprise that many organizations
rely on e-mail and instant messaging for collaborative
interactions. These are ubiquitous in the enterprise and
are easy means of communication. Many have also
deployed conferencing and Webcasting capabilities.
Others have established information portals or use voice
and text messaging. Although all of these are collaborative in nature, they have a disadvantage in that they do
not record or track the collaboration being performed.
Without any form of documentation, it is difficult to
improve the overall collaborative environment.

Collaborative BI Architecture
In our research and after examining collaborative BI case
studies, we determined that there are four environments
that make up the complete collaborative architecture.
They are:
BI environment. This consists of the traditional products
that support the modern BI and data warehousing

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systems. These products are used by BI and data

warehouse builders to create the repository of data used
by information workers to create reports and analytics
for decision making. Products used in this environment
include the BI platforms from companies such as IBM
Cognos, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP BusinessObjects, as
well as individual on-premises and cloud products from
companies such as Actuate, QlikTech, Information Builders, JasperSoft, MicroStrategy, Pentaho, SAS, Tableau
Software, and Yellowfin. The BI component could also
include packaged BI applications.
Many BI vendors provide support for the first two of the
three requirements for a collaborative BI environment:
collaborative interaction and information enhancement.
They can support the distribution and annotation of
reports and analytics, for example. Collaborative interaction is usually supported by integrated instant messaging
and/or by e-mail interfaces to the office environment and
packages such as Microsoft Office or Google Docs (now
Google Drive). Several BI vendors also enable BI results to
be integrated into collaboration platforms. This integration
extends the BI environment with content management,
search, and certain other collaborative features.
BI vendors may also interface to social computing tools
such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube.
Integration with the office environment and collaborative platforms may indirectly provide social computing
capabilities, such as communities and profiles, for a BI
solution. Information enhancement is provided in certain
BI tools through the use of annotations, tagging, rating,
and so on.
Office environment. These technologies include workgroup

and personal productivity tools such as Google Docs,

IBM Lotus, and Microsoft Office. They include word
processors, spreadsheets, presentation tools, personal
databases, and e-mail systems, and may also include onpremises and cloud products for social computing. These
tools are most commonly used to share and communicate
about BI results to others, but they too may be used to
enhance the content and the context of the BI results with
comments, external information, or expert opinions.

Collaborative BI

BI environment

Collaboration platform

Social network analysis

Information portal

BI search

Content management and wikis

Collaborative interaction

Enterprise search

Information enhancement

Collaborative interaction
Information enhancement

Office environment
Productivity tools

Collaborative decision making

(communities/profiles)

Collaborative interaction

Process management

Purpose-built
collaborative solution
Collaborative interaction
Information enhancement
Collaborative decision making (communities/
profiles, process integration, decision
techniques, decision tracking)

Information enhancement
Basic collaboration

Advanced collaboration

Figure 3: Collaborative BI architecture.

Collaboration platform. This technology platform provides

cross-business-unit collaboration capabilities and is

outside of the BI environment. The actual technologies
supported by any given vendor platform vary considerably. Software for content management, search, and
process management, for example, may come with the
platform or may be available as separate components
or options. These platforms may offer a variety of the
collaborative and social computing features outlined
in Figure 2. They also usually support a vendors BI
tools. However, except for communities and team-based
workspaces, these platforms often lack decision-making
techniques, collaborative connections to business processes and workflows, and the ability to track and record
business decisions. Examples of products include IBM
WebSphere, Microsoft SharePoint, Oracle WebCenter,
and SAP NetWeaver.
Purpose-built collaborative solution. Products in this cat-

egory are developed from the ground up for collaborative

decision making. Vendors here offer either an on-premises
implementation or one that is in the cloud. Examples of
cloud-based solutions are SalesForce Chatter and SAP
Jam (StreamWork).

Product solutions in this category are at various levels of

development but are evolving to support the three main
features of collaborative BI. They are also being integrated
with the BI and office environments and, in some cases,
with enterprise collaboration platforms.

Mobile devices are good for

collaborating on many fronts,
including BI. They make sharing
and interacting with BI results
easy and attractive.
Figure 3 presents an architecture that supports an
evolutionary approach to a mature collaborative BI
environment. It includes examples of the technologies
that support each environment.
Given our discussion of the four components in a
complete collaborative architecture, it is clear that

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Collaborative BI

organizations can implement collaborative interaction and

information enhancement using the capabilities currently
offered by, or being added to, BI products. Deploying collaborative decision making, however, requires the use of
a collaborative platform and/or a separate, purpose-built
business user collaboration and decision-making solution
to satisfy requirements.
Organizations will not implement a full collaborative BI
environment in a single step, but will gradually evolve to
support the collaborative features outlined in this article.
An organization may start, for example, by first integrating the BI and office environments, then exploit the
collaborative capabilities of an enterprise collaboration
platform and/or of a purpose-built, collaborative decisionmaking solution.

hierarchy. After all, information enhancement can come

from any corner of the enterpriseperhaps even from
outside the organization. It is important to support the
right people in the right places to enable their expertise
and passion to be shared with their co-workers.
Easy access is important, but so are the proper controls and set
of usage rules. Security of corporate assets and the proper

utilization of these assets must always be considered

when creating a collaborative BI environment. Who can
access and use collaborative components, and when?
What collaborative activities are proper, and how are
they monitored? What information assets can be shared?
Be sure you have the proper controls and technologies in
place to answer these questions.
Start smallusually within a department or line of business.

Deploying collaborative decision

making requires the use of a
collaborative platform and/or
a separate, purpose-built
business user collaboration
and decision-making solution
to satisfy requirements.
Collaborative BI Best Practices
From conversations with clients and vendors, as well as
research into what works, we uncovered several best practices for implementing a collaborative BI environment:
Create a culture that promotes collaboration. Collaborative

BI requires the right mindsetnot just new technologyand senior executives must lead the way. In many
cases, this may mean a cultural change in the organization so that collaboration is encouraged and rewarded. It
also means that all information workers must be able to
participate regardless of their positions in the corporate

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As with any enterprisewide or other large technology

initiative, it is important to demonstrate the value of
collaborative BI through small projects. Perhaps the first
project can simply allow information workers to add comments, tag reports, or create ratings or bookmarkseasily
accomplished in several popular BI technologies. The
next set of projects may bring in the ability to document
the brainstorming that takes place before a decision is
made. Finally, a mature environment may begin to not
only track decisions but also to link them to performance
metrics and business workflows, thus demonstrating the
real benefit of more accurate and faster decision making.
Deploy BI and collaborative technologies that can be accessed
and used by all workers. The heart of collaborative BI is

the ability of people to work together, but it must be

understood that different people work in different ways.
Inexperienced information consumers may interact with
the collaborative BI environment quite differently from
the more technologically savvy information producers.
Collaborative BI must accommodate these differences
or it will not be used. It must also provide information
workers with timely access to the decision-making
environment. Look into collaborative capabilities both
within and external to BI technologies.
Develop a holistic strategy to leverage collaborative assets.

Again, these consist of BI solutions, Office-style solutions,

Collaborative BI

collaborative platforms, and purpose-built, collaborative

decision-making solutions. The strategy must ultimately
encompass all forms of communication and analytics. For
collaborative BI to be adopted throughout the enterprise,
ensure that it will be part of the information workers
personal workflow process. Because many companies
have more than one BI tool, the implementation team
should determine the collaborative strategy across all
BI technologies to avoid building silos of collaboration.
Multiple silos of isolated collaborative BI would defeat the
entire purpose!

full spectrum of information as soon as it is discovered

and made available. There is no constant searching for
something over and over every time it is needed.

Ensure that the companys culture and technology are

simpatico. A best practice for this environment is to unite

IT and the business by including business workers in the

technology selection, designs, requirements gathering,
and so on. Look into deploying self-service BI.
Make a collaborative BI environment that supports team
activities. Such activities include the ability to discuss and

insert knowledge about business data, BI results, and so

on; sharing knowledge and content, as well as the ability
to embed reports and analytics in other communication
mechanisms (e.g., Microsoft Office); the ability to
collectively determine the best course of action; and the
ability to document the decisions made and measure the
resulting ROI from the environment.
Ensure that the decision-making environment is tied to the
operational business workflows. The ability to quickly and

accurately react to a decision will be the ultimate test for

the value of this environment.

Benefits
The benefits of collaborative BI are clear: better and faster
decision making. There are more tangible benefits as well:

The ability to rapidly bring together data, analytic

results, e-mail messages, documents, instant or social
media messages, and other formal and informal forms
of information to enhance a team decision. Registering these pieces of information once within the
collaborative framework eliminates the significantly
redundant and inconsistent research performed by
team members. Everyone on the team has access to the

Rapid detection and alerting of appropriate personnel

to anomalies that require investigation, discussion, and
fast resolution. Everyone on the team can immediately
begin working on the anomaly as soon as it is detected.
This means quick access to experts, the ability to find
and share critical information, and the establishment
of connections to others working on similar problems.
It also enables better tracking of anomaly resolution by
documenting the teams progress.
Higher quality of decisions resulting in significantly
more meaningful and positive impacts. Collaborative
BI environments allow teams to examine and discuss
all aspects of a problem or impending activity, which,
in turn, leads to common insight and superior decisions. Understanding all aspects of the decisionhow
it was made, who was involved, what the expected
outcomes will be, and so onmeans the effects of
the action(s) taken will be targeted, timely, integrated
throughout the enterprise, and more appropriate for
the given situation. They may also serve as an example
for another project with a similar problem.

Collaborative BI requires the right

mindsetnot just new technology
and senior executives must lead
the way.
Which areas in an enterprise are most likely to benefit
from collaborative BI? We found that the most active collaborative BI users tend to be the departments or groups
within an enterprise that are responsible for customer
interactions. Marketing, sales, and customer service find
collaborative BI to be most beneficial to their workflows.
However, collaborative BI is also quite popular for

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Collaborative BI

departments such as inventory/supply chain management

and finance.

environment in terms of its ability to support these

collaborative BI needs. Now you are on your way!

Getting Started

Reference

Enterprises today are demanding faster and better

decisions from their employees. For most enterprise initiatives, a good starting point is to develop a collaborative
BI strategyit is your road map to help you avoid costly
missteps and to help your organization better understand
what collaborative BI can ultimately offer. Collaborative
BI is not a single project but rather a series of coordinated
projects with a singular goal in mind: the creation of an
enterprisewide, collaborative decision-making environment available to all who need it. Each project extends
collaborative BI to a larger audience and contributes a bit
more to the overall maturity of the environment.

Imhoff, Claudia, and Colin White [2010]. Business

Intelligence and Collaboration: A Natural Marriage,
Business Intelligence Journal, Volume 15, Number 3.

As you are developing a strategy, it is also a good idea to

fully understand the reasons for implementing collaborative BI in your organization. We found the following
reasons to be high on most enterprises lists:
Enabling team and group decision making: The need to sup-

port a more collaborative decision-making environment

was paramount.
Connecting business intelligence to business processes and
operations: That is, information workers need to be able

to act on their decisions in an opportune manner. Many

IT administrators and consultants believe this is the top
reason to implement collaborative BI.
Creating a better and faster decision-making experience: Many

organizations recognize the need for more accurate and

timely information. Many BI users believe this is the
most important reason to implement collaborative BI.
Improving user interaction, information sharing, and information
consumability: An environment that is too complex, inflex-

ible, or inhibits sharing analytics and other informational

assets cannot support collaborative BI.
Once you understand the reasons for collaborative BI,
you are ready to match them with the technologies that
enable it. Be sure to assess and document your current

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permission.