Collaborative Business Intelligence: Enabling Collaborative Decision Making in Enterprises

Enterprises have successfully deployed business intelligence (data warehousing, reporting, data mining, analytics, and information visualization) technologies to enable strategic decision making. Increasingly, there is a realization that the same sort of high quality information and analytics tools are needed by the many knowledge workers who have to make many operational decisions as they engage in the business operations of the enterprise. Most of these business processes are performed by multiple knowledge workers, and require collaborative decision making, sometimes involving business partners such as outsourced vendors, suppliers, and service providers outside the enterprise. In this paper, we introduce the concept of collaborative business intelligence , which is a combination of business intelligence and collaboration technologies targeted at collaborative decision making. We describe the requirements for collaborative BI, and illustrate them via a real-world use case of managing the operations of a large data center. We describe a prototype collaborative BI platform we are developing at HP. We leverage research that we had done earlier on the Business Cockpit, an intelligent business operations management platform, which combined data integration, process modeling, a process data warehouse, and analytics technologies to enable the monitoring and analysis of business processes. For collaborative BI, we add capabilities for collaboration via 3-dimensonal virtual rooms, visual analytics, and multi-modal interaction technologies. We also need richer metadata models: in addition to modeling data, events, and processes, we also have to model the knowledge of human experts. We describe the experience we have gained from this effort, and our ongoing research.