February 10, 2015 — Arlington, Massachusetts

According to Curt Hall, "Social business analytics requires an infrastructure for sourcing, processing, storing, and analyzing social and enterprise data, and for integrating the findings into an organization's other data analysis and various business processes. Figure 1 shows how, when combined, the various technologies enable social business analytics to perform "deep analysis" of structured and unstructured data from different sources, including the social cloud and enterprise applications."

"A key capability required of social business analytics is some sort of enterprise search functionality," Hall continues. A current trend is to utilize some form of a search-based BI platform that combines enterprise search capabilities with BI reporting and analytic functionality. In such a configuration, the enterprise search engine works in conjunction with sophisticated text mining and BI engines, thus enabling users to index structured and unstructured content, search for specific topics, and perform various forms of analysis to obtain heuristic answers to business questions."

* Excerpted from "Social Business Analytics: Beyond Social Media Listening," () Data Insight & Social BI Executive Report, Vol. 15, No. 1