Business User Empowerment through

Collaborative Analytics
CHI 2008 “Social Data Analysis” Workshop: Position Paper

Daniela Busse Introduction

SAP Labs (Palo Alto)
3475 Deer Creek Rd “Data analysis is traditionally thought of as
Palo Alto, CA 94304 USA something done by experts in isolation or in
daniela.busse@sap.com small groups. Social data analysis, however,
suggests the possibility of massive
Richard Hong collaboration in the discovery process,
SAP Labs (Palo Alto) involving experts and non-experts alike.”
3420 Hillview Ave
Palo Alto, CA 94304 USA To this day, the power of social data analysis (i.e.
richard.hong@sap.com ‘collective analysis of data supported by social
interaction’) is not yet tapped into successfully by
enterprise software, despite evidence to the fact that
collaborative analytics is a fact of life for many business
users, and related requirements are being
communicated by our customers loud and clear.

In today’s enterprise software, ‘old school’ approaches

Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). to (heavy-weight) analytics abound: monolithic data
CHI 2008, April 5 – April 10, 2008, Florence, Italy warehouses are interfaced to via slow and cumbersome
ACM 1-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx. reporting tools, that deliver static, asynchronous, and

single user snapshots, a.k.a. business intelligence
reports.
However, the real ‘intelligence’ that analytics could
provide for business users is articulated in visions of
future analytics capabilities, that:

are embedded contextually in the everyday
work activities of professional users (not
isolated in a separate reporting
environment)

represent dynamic and real-time windows
into the enterprise data (not sealed-off
snapshots)

allow an interaction with the data & related
activities that is easily accessible and
intuitive, i.e. easy to use for any level of
user

are supported by tools that allow multi-
faceted collaboration on and around the
data and the analytics results

eventually will make use of the “wisdom of
the crowds” of professional users in
socially, continuously creating &
interpreting the data cloud available in the
enterprise space for better business
performance
In this position paper, the authors will briefly outline
their thoughts, ideas & insights into two of these areas
(collaboration support and embedded analytics),
illustrate those with examples from past & current
2
projects run at SAP Labs (Palo Alto), and attempt to
identify areas of opportunity for social data analysis.
Collaborative Analytics in the Enterprise
In the current model of Business Intelligence, all to
often specialized roles are created within companies
(such as “business analysts” or, more informally, “our
SQL reports guy”..) whose sole role is to be familiar
with cumbersome reporting interfaces, and (hopefully)
with having an overview of the data that’s available in
the system for reporting use.
These reporting users are then responsible for fielding
questions from the user pool they service, and answer
them through business reports in regular intervals or
one-off occasions. The target recipients of these reports
typically are the knowledge workers at that company,
up to c-level users that often need a higher level of
aggregation, and a perspective across the value chain
(often focusing on the bottom-line impact of whatever
operational process under investigation).
Information pyramid
Here is another level of detail on the different user
roles in enterprise analytics, to annotate Fig 1 below.
C-level (executives): 360 degree view of information
because of the position on the pyramid. They can turn
around 360 and look at the info at all direction but only
within a short range so the level is high, not very
detailed. Only one dimensional collaboration.
Mid-level: Business analysts and information workers
have overview of information in a specific domain and
also relatively detailed information. They have two
dimensional collaborations (vertical and horizontal).

O-level (operational officers and workers): These
people in the lowest level of information, the original
application transactional data, have two dimensional
collaborations but they cannot see too far in both
directions.
Figure 1 – information Pyramid: Collaborative Analytics across User Roles
In today’s world of work, however, the expectation is
there from information workers and c-levels alike, to be
able to have these data & interpretations available at
their fingertips, and being able to modify and
manipulate them themselves, ad-hoc, and embedded in
their current work activities.
3
Financial Operational Steering: the “S&OP” Process
For instance, during the ‘Sales and Operations’ process,
in which different business units come together in
regular meetings in order to share and compare their
data, unearth & explain potential issues, and aim at
coherence in data and interpretation across business
units, is a good example of a business user activity that
is critical to good business performance, has a rich use
of social data analysis, but is currently completely
unsupported by enterprise software tools. The work is
done manually, in meetings and legwork, often
painfully and laboriously, to make sure that overall the
bottom line impact can be calculated by informed plan-
actuals comparisons across the value chain. Overall,
the finance department will need to be able identify
how the company overall manages to achieve their
earning estimates on a quarterly and yearly basis.
We proposed a solution for this business activity (see
Fig. 1) that highlights the collaborative needs of the
financial controller in gathering and interpreting
financial and operational data from various business
units, and in following up on potential issues (i.e.
exception handling).
We also think that this area, however, would be a great
case study for social data analysis as discussed in this
workshop: we envision the business units getting
actively involved in maintaining their data, in the
interpretation & comparison of it, and in the unearthing
of issues that span multiple departments – rather than
these activities being bundled in the hands of the
financial controller, as is the case today.

Exploring opportunities for social data analysis in
contexts such as this one will be one aim of the authors
in the proposed workshop.
Figure 2 - Collaborative Analytics for Financial Controlling in the "S&OP" Process in
Enterprise Companies
Embedded Analytics
Embedded analytics is a new trend in business that
promotes the concept doing analytics right in the
business process context, or in many cases people’s
social context. It is all about empowering the end users
4
to do analytics without any IT support because they do
it right inside their familiar territory, their business
application. Traditional analytics is tool-based
centralized process where people have to a
sophisticated tool at a fixed space. Also, the data used
for analysis is based on historical data. This time and
space constraints made business analytics the task for
IT professionals and savvy business analysts. The new
generation analytics, powered by real-time analytics
and embedding, is increasingly becoming pervasive
which breaks the time and space barriers. The social
interactions are crossing not only multiple
communication channels (face-to-face, voice (VoIP,
voicemail), websites, SMS, E-Mail, group calendaring,
blog, podcasting) but also spaces (conference room,
team rooms, discussion forum, focus groups,
webconferencing, wiki). These are becoming perfect
media for embedded analytics. The collective thinking,
augmented by the new media, is transformed to
collective intelligence to guide people make the right
decisions.
There are different types of embedded analytics. The
way of embedding is evolving as the technology
develops.
(1) view level embedding: this is a very basic and
primitive way of embedding. It uses an analytics view
inside portal entry pages which lead user to an
analytics tool. This is, in many cases, called embedding
but it is really an entry to the tools, you can’t really
solve the problem within your business context.
Advantage of view level embedding is simple to
implement.
(2) Data level embedding: This embedding is right in
the context of application, or business process. The
transactional table representing the business context

contains the fields coming from analytics data source.
One example is the spend management system where
you can track spending on a particular commodity
category by checking the progress to the planned value
which is coming from analytics data source. You can
use this information to adjust the target right inside the
application without actually leaving from it.
(3) Activity level embedding: There are many cases you
need analytics information in the middle of the business
activities. For example, in procurement sourcing
process, the selection step for qualified suppliers to
invite is ideally coming from the supplier evaluation
analytics based on the past delivery, freight, location,
etc. Also in this case, the process to evaluate the
qualified suppliers is a collective process: typically the
purchasers will upload their own records of the
suppliers they dealt with in the past and consolidated in
the BI system and evaluate them together manually or
The Authors
Daniela Busse, Ph.D.
Daniela Busse is a Product Owner and User Experience
Expert in the Business Process Renovation group – an
internal, global innovation team in the Office of the CEO
at SAP Labs that lives and promotes at design-led
innovation in the enterprise space.
5
use certain kind of criteria and determine the final
ranking.
(4) Context aware embedding: This level of embedding
is like smart tags (address can be tokenized to link to a
map, product name can be link to product specification
page, etc). All numbers, alert messages, locations,
time, etc in any document can all be smart tagged to
analytics information. This also includes the on-going
document which is in the process editing. This gives the
user the insights what the significance of the number
the user entered is. This level embedding can also
introduce location specific analytics powered by GIS.
For example, customer analytics retrieved once you are
onsite.
Richard Hong
Head of SAP Analytics User Experience Design and
Architect responsible for analytics application design
and analytics user interface framework, currently
working on SAP’s new generation analytics framework
with special focus on collaborative and embedded
analytics.