The Importance of BI Commentary

Why Is Commentary Important?

We communicate every day. Communication through text is especially abundant with the proliferation of new on-demand technologies. Have you gone through your emails today? Have you read the news, weather, or blogs (like this one)? Communication is the backbone to every interpersonal interaction. Without it, we are left guessing and assuming.

BI implementations are no exception when it comes to communication’s importance, and I would argue communication is a major component of every BI environment. The goal of any BI application is to discover and expose actionable information from data, but without collaboration, discovering insights becomes difficult. By allowing users to collaborate immediately in the BI application, new insights can be discovered quicker.

Any BI conversation should maintain its own dedicated communication channel, and the optimal place for these conversations is as close to the information-consumption phase as possible. By allowing users to collaborate in discussions over results at the same location as the data, users will be empowered to extract as much information as possible.

Unfortunately, commentary support is absent from OBIEE.

The Current OBIEE Communication Model

The lack of commentary support does not stop the community from developing their own methods or approaches to communicating within their BI environments. Right now, common approaches include purchasing pre-developed software, engineering custom solutions, or forcing the conversations into other channels.

Purchasing a commentary application or developing your own internal solutions expedites the user communication process. However, what about those who do not find a solution, and instead decide to use a “work-around” approach?

Choosing to ignore the missing functionality is the cheapest approach, initially, but may actually cost more in the long run. To engage in simple conversations, users are required to leave the BI dashboard, which adds time and difficulty to their daily processes. And reiterating the context of a conversation is both time consuming and error prone.

Additionally, which communication channel will the BI conversations invade? A dedicated communication channel, built specifically to easily display and relay the BI topics of interest, is the most efficient, and beneficial, solution.

How ChitChat Can Help

ChitChat provides a channel of communication directly within the BI environment, allowing users to engage in conversations as close to the data consumption phase as possible. Users will never be required to leave the BI application to engage in a conversation about the data, and they won’t need to reiterate the environment through screenshots or descriptions.

Recognizing the importance of separate channels of communication, ChitChat also easily allows each channel to maintain their respective scopes. For instance, a user may discover an error on a BI dashboard. Rather than simply identifying the error in the BI environment, the user can export the comment to Atlassian JIRA and create a ticket for the issue to be resolved, thus maintaining the appropriate scopes of both JIRA and ChitChat. Integrations allow existing channels of communication to maintain their respective importance, and appropriately restrict the scope of conversations.

ChitChat is placed in the most opportune location for BI commentary, while maintaining the correct scope of the conversation. Other approaches often ignore one of these two aspects of BI commentary, but both are required to efficiently support a community within a BI environment. The most effective solution is not one that simply solves the problem, or meets some of the criteria, but the solution that meets all of the requirements.

Commentary Made Simple

Conversation around a BI environment will always occur, regardless of the supporting infrastructure or difficulty in doing so. Rather than forcing users to spend time working around common obstacles or developing their own solutions, investing in an embedded application will save both time and money. These offerings will not only meet the basic requirements, but also ensure the best experience for users, and the most return on investment.

Providing users the exact features they need, where they need it, is one step in nurturing a healthy BI environment, and ChitChat is an excellent solution to meet these criteria.

To find out more about ChitChat, or to request a demo, click here!