Say, for example, that you’ve just purchased a cell phone, and after using it for a week, you found it had many flaws. Its battery only lasts five hours in standby mode, or it quickly gets too hot for your temple. Can you really complain to the manufacturer and get help? Perhaps not. After all, it is only a Rp 200,000 handset anyway.
Perhaps you’ve just had lunch at a seafood restaurant and you found the crab wasn’t fresh, and the cook looked so sleepy he must have had a little too much Chablis the night before. How do you warn your friends and relatives not to go to this restaurant?
Or let’s say you’ve just returned from a hospital in West Jakarta to get some medical help and were unhappy with the way the nurses treated you.
What would you do? Well, you could do two things. Complain to the manufacturer or write about it on your Facebook or Twitter. If you lodge a complaint, it will usually fall on deaf ears. So you resort to writing on social networking sites.
The age of social networks has given us Facebook and Twitter to share our disappointments, which smart companies can mine and use to their advantage.
They can use the information gathered from social networking sites to improve their products, provide their employees with the right training or even monitor what their competitors are doing, if they have the right tools.
Businesses should not ignore social networks, especially as Indonesia has the fastest growing number of Facebook users in the world, who are certainly producing a lot of data on a daily basis.
“Companies have tons of internal data at their disposal as well,” said Singgih Wandojo, the operations director at SAP Indonesia. He reiterated this as SAP launched a new version of its Business Intelligence (BI) solution.
BI is a set of tools that enables businesses to turn raw data, including data captured from social networking sites, into useful information, such as what colors new car buyers would like their new cars to come in, how they want the dashboard to look like or what electronic devices they want cars to have as standard features.
Data was once kept in databases. Then we had data warehousing, which captured data from places like transactions systems. Then data mining tools were developed to extract information from structured and unstructured data. But to really turn data into useful information, companies need Business Intelligence.
BI tools are provided by a number of companies including IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. Incidentally, SAP has coined another term: Business Analytics.
“Business Analytics is an umbrella term,” Atul Patel, SAP’s VP for Business Analytics and Sustainability, told me recently. SAP’s BI group of solutions includes BusinessObjects Explorer, BusinessObjects Crystal Report, BusinessObjects Excelcios, BusinessObjects Web Intelligence and BusinessObjects Web Analysis.
These tools offer decision makers speed, mobility and the use of social networks.
Decision makers want speed because they need information in real time to beat their competitors and expand their businesses. SAP maximized the speed of the database search process by inventing a technology called “in memory computing”.
As you may already know, data used to be stored in spinning hard disks. In the past few years, the speed of access on hard disks improved significantly, yet they are no match for the memory. Therefore, to increase the speed, the large amount of data is moved from the hard disk to the memory before the search is performed.
Decision makers demand mobility as they are warming up to the idea of working anywhere, anytime. SAP meets this demand by developing its own solutions for mobile devices. During the press conference, Atul demonstrated how he was able to use his BI applications on an iPad, to show us what he meant by mobility.
I started this article by listing some of the ways we could use social networks such as Facebook for more than just telling the world we are hungry.
However, as we also know, there are infinite ways we express our opinions on Facebook or Twitter. So how can companies extract the right information? For example, how can a shampoo maker learn whether people love its product or not?
From : The Jakarta Post
