Within two years, 15 per cent of business intelligence deployments are expected to combine collaborative and social decision-making environments.

Business analytics and social media were on the watch list of many research firms last year. In its top 10 predictions 2010, IDC said it expected business analytics to be a key technology area to help chief information officers manage cost, comply with regulations and, most importantly, grow the business as information is treated as a strategic asset within the organisation.

IDC also expected social media to hit "critical mass" in terms of acceptance and adoption within the enterprise. With the convergence of economic necessity, mature enabling technology such as business analytics tools, and increasing market awareness, social media will gain traction and establish itself as a natural and accepted tool for Asia companies, CIOs, and chief marketing officers, it said.

It would seem almost inevitable, then, that social analytics has emerged as one of the key themes in technology forecasts for 2011.

According to Gartner, social analytics describes the process of measuring, analysing and interpreting the results of interactions and associations among people, topics and ideas. These interactions may occur on social software applications used in the workplace, in internally or externally facing communities or on the social web. The tools used in social analytics involve a number of specialised analysis techniques such as social filtering, social network analysis, sentiment analysis and social media analytics.

IDC predicts that 2011 will be the year where the trend of combining social media with business analytics will make its mark across most of the key enterprise applications in use today.  “Organisations will start to incorporate social media and collaboration with their business analytics. These will be embedded in unified communications, collaboration and social applications, and will aid in determining trends that the business will need to focus on.”

“Social analytics will help an enterprise hear their customers’ demands,” said Mr Eddie Chau, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of business and brand online intelligence services company Brandtology. “It helps in targeting the right people – those that are really influential. Instead of having all those different voices shouting, whispering and murmuring their sentiments, social analytics gives it to you in bullet points. This way, the companies and agencies respond to these sentiments systematically.”

As Mr Lau Shih Hor, CEO of Elixir Technology, also pointed out, enterprises do not just need information about the content found on social media platforms; they also need correctly-assigned weightage with respect to the importance and relevance of the content, in order to make effective business decisions. “Here lies the biggest challenge to the enterprise: How can one filter out the noise while retaining the key information by assigning the right weightage to the contents?”

To this end, Elixir, an integrated business intelligence solutions provider, is working towards providing a deeper level of analytics which can derive the "influencing factor" of social media authors to give the correct view of the importance and relevance of their content.

Gartner expects that over the next 12 to 18 months, enterprises will focus on developing collaborative and social decision-making environments as they look to improve performance based on information gathered from these environments. With this, they will be looking for BI and analytic applications that can provide a link to these environments in order to generate useful business insights. It foresees that within two years, 15 per cent of BI deployments will combine collaborative and social decision-making environments.

The emergence of social analytics could transform the way business processes are managed within the organisation, said Mr James Kobielus, Senior Analyst with Forrester Research. “Traditional BPM resembles top-down social engineering - in other words, process reengineering opportunities are traditionally identified by management, processes are changed and automated by technologists, and new processes are pushed onto employees and customers.”

With the incorporation of social analytics, a more social architecture could emerge with real-time “crowdsourced” advice supplementing guided analytics to support processes such as routing, approval, and exception handling within the organisation.