Earlier this year, the well-respected Gartner Group published a research paper entitled The Rise of Collaborative Decision Making. Gartner predict the emergence of a new type of Business Intelligence application that they labelled CDM (Collaborative Decision Making). This appears in essence to be a combination of Business Intelligence and social software (akin to Facebook for example).

This would not be applicable to routine statistics, but might be appropriate to complex on-off decisions such as whether to close a branch, make a major change to opening hours or install self service terminals.

Talis Decisions already supports this kind of activity to some extent.  At the bottom of the Web Intelligence screen there is a Discussion bar. This can be opened by clicking  on the icon.

Once opened, you can add a comment, comment on other people’s comments etc in much the same way as in a forum discussion. The discussion stays with the report. You can reply to other users, or you can reply to everyone.

It is probably fair to say that this facility will be used only occasionally – and at that, only in an environment where there are multiple users: but it is useful to know that it is available if necessary. Judicious use has the potential to save a messy and unstructured e-mail discussion.