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THE POWER OF COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE

Thanks to the new web, companies are beginning to conceive, design, develop, and distribute products and services in profoundly new ways. With costs of collaboration falling precipitously, organizations may be going through the biggest change in their history.

Don TapscottToday's Insight keynote speakers include, Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics, and Marge Breya, chief marketing officer of Business Objects. Don and Marge will be speaking about the power of tapping into the collective intelligence of business analysts and other smart people who want to work together to solve problems.

After all, if you can make an encyclopedia like Wikipedia through mass collaboration, what else? We're starting to see a new kind of collaboration where peers come together to create value. New tools are providing managers with new options and opportunities inside and outside the organization.

The smartest companies are seeing this phenomenon and embracing it. They are using tools like wikis, weblogs, instant messaging, and social networks to enable their own staff to work across organizational silos and transform the way they collaborate. They are turning information into knowledge that has been validated by users, and turning it into effective action.

The new "the wiki workplace" provides a new platform for high performance and success, but few companies have yet developed a solid strategy for getting there. The focus is shifting from using information to cut costs to using it to find new opportunities and innovate to beat the competition and create sustainable value.

Organizations are using collective intelligence to bring value to their employees, to their business ecosystem of customers, partners, and suppliers, and to the community at large.

Collective Intelligence Across the Organization

It is vital to let people share and interact with information across the organization. Decisions are rarely made by individuals. According to a recent survey commissioned by Business Objects and carried out by the Economist Intelligent Unit, today's executives rely primarily on "internal briefings" and "conversations with colleagues" when making difficult decisions. Decision-making is a team effort. The more information is shared, the more likely it is that bad decisions are avoided.

Every time somebody analyzes information, they add value to it, and that value needs to be captured as part of the business intelligence process, so that everybody can use it in the decision-making cycle. The ability to collaborate around information should be a fundamental part of your information systems.

An open and collaborative atmosphere of information-sharing is also vital for the trust and respect that is needed to implement strategic decisions successfully. Leadership is about deciding where to go and getting everyone to go along with you. If you don't explain how decisions are made and what is behind them, there will be no trust in the decision-making process, and people will leave decisions unimplemented on the assumption that someone else will come along and change the strategy.

Senior management and employees down the line often see reality differently. Explaining to employees the data and models used in strategic decision-making not only helps validate those decisions, but also establishes trust. And it's a two-way street a wiki approach to strategy can help raise problems from the front line that might otherwise not make it up the corporate hierarchy.

Finally, collective intelligence can help organizations to create an iterative, learning cycle of decision-making, by tracking and analyzing decision effectiveness, rather than starting from scratch each time.

Collective Intelligence Across the Business Ecosystem

No organization is an island. Organizations rely heavily on information from their customers and suppliers to improve performance. Your account management staff is probably passing information to your customers and suppliers today, using fax, email, or telephone. Letting them access this same information more directly and flexibility can reduce your costs and increase customer satisfaction. They're requesting this information because it helps them streamline their own business practices-providing it to them can help differentiate your service from that of other people and increase customer loyalty.

Organizations need to share information outside the firewall, in order to increase performance excellence across the entire business ecosystem. By sharing information more effectively with your partners, customers, or suppliers, you can create win-win situations. For example, Harley-Davidson shares benchmark information among the independent owners of Harley-Davidson branded stores. By encouraging the sharing of best practices, the performance of everybody improves.

You may also be able to generate new revenue streams, generating more from the information you already have in your data warehouse. New Information OnDemand technology provides a platform to make it easy for any organization to turn your existing data warehouse into a profit center. Companies such as Owens & Minor, a leading distributor of medical and surgical supplies, have used BI extranets not only to increased customer and supplier satisfaction, but also to increase fee revenue.

Collective Intelligence in the Community

Today's new collaboration tools can go much further than improving corporate profits. They can be used to mine meaningful data from around the globe, to allow collaboration between information experts to solve real-world problems, and to harness the collective intelligence of the community.

Carbon Offset ChallengeWe've created the Insight site as an on-line community dedicated to those of us who want to use our passion for numbers to make a difference. We want to tap into the collective intelligence of business analysts and other smart people who want to work together to solve some really tough problems. We believe that Insight is the first site dedicated to taking data and acting in a meaningful way to help companies, individuals, nonprofit organizations and anyone with a really interesting problem (and the data to back it up) find a solution.

We encourage companies and other organizations to share with us specific problems they'd like to have solved. All they will have to do is provide details of the problem and share appropriate data both structured and unstructured that you and others can review and analyze.

Our first project was the Zerofootprint platform, a tool that helps citizens measure and manage the impact their individual lives are having on the environment. At this year's conference, we're offering to offset attendees' carbon footprints, and asking for your help in determining the next challenges we should work on.

Conclusion

Information is useless without people to analyze trends and implement business change. Collective intelligence has the potential to help every organization towards performance excellence.

Daily Intelligence

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More Conference Coverage

For more Insight conference details, visit Business Objects Americas 07 User Conference event site.

Insight
INSIGHT
Tap into the power of collective intelligence. Join the business analyst community sharing ideas and data visualizations and participate in the first community challenge to start to solve global warming.		             Don Tapscott
DON TAPSCOTT
Guest speaker Don Tapscott is an internationally renowned authority on the strategic value and impact of information technology. He consistently predicts the next business imperatives and defines the business models and strategies that the new imperatives require.		             Timo Elliott
TIMO ELLIOTT
Timo Elliott joined Business Objects in 1991 as employee #8. He plays a key part in Business Objects strategy and positioning and is a passionate advocate of the power of BI. Read Timo's Blog