On the Role of Social Software Techniques for the Design of Self-
Organising Enterprise Reporting Portals
Martin Böhringer, Peter Gluchowski, Christian Kurze, Christian Schieder
Chair of Systems Engineering and Information Systems
Chemnitz University of Technology
Thueringer Weg 7, 09126 Chemnitz, Germany
{Martin.Boehringer|Peter.Gluchowski|Christian.Kurze|Christian.Schieder}
@wirtschaft.tu-chemnitz.de
Abstract. Modern enterprise reporting portals
commonly address the information needs of top
management executives. With the advent of
pervasive Business Intelligence systems other,
larger, groups of users are moving into the focus
of system designers. Along with them specific
design requirements surface – transforming
design considerations of prior efforts targeting
management reporting needs. Owing to vast and
heterogeneous target audiences, new breeds of
enterprise reporting portals become necessary.
As a core feature they need to provide effective
and therefore usable means for bottom-up
content personalisation, commonly referred to as
Web 2.0 functionality.
This paper provides a research agenda using
insights from research in Social Software to
improve effectiveness and efficiency of
collaborative enterprise reporting. It offers a
comprehensive view on recent developments
fostering collaboration between report users and
report designers. We present two preliminary
artefacts: a proposal for a concept for self-
organising enterprise reporting portals and a
design prototype implementing the concept.
Keywords. Enterprise Reporting, Business
Intelligence, Social Networking, Reporting
Portals, Collaboration, Social Software, Web 2.0,
Enterprise 2.0
1. Introduction
Over the last couple of years design research
in Business Intelligence (BI) has typically
focused on the creation and improvement of
technologies for the preparation, analysis,
filtering and categorisation of existing data,
strategies for data (quality) management or
storage concepts and algorithms for vast amounts
of data.
Due to larger user bases the challenges for IT
departments to satisfy the individual
informational needs of large heterogeneous user
groups increase. Centralised control and content
provisioning might not be the best strategy to
solve this issue.
The major purpose of Social Software is the
utilisation and stimulation of what is called the
wisdom of crowds [18]. We argue that this
concept should be applied to improve enterprise
reporting portals as the proliferation of
information and the participation in decision-
making increases throughout enterprises. This is
a fascinating field for further research. Our paper
aims at the description of possible connections
between the two disciplines in order to provide
an agenda for future work. To demonstrate the
technological feasibility of our approach we
provide a prototype based on Social (Net-
working) Software, utilising the concepts of
social tagging and recommendation.
After presenting related work we begin by
describing the state-of-the-art in enterprise
reporting portals before we introduce the concept
of Social Software. Next we propose a blue print
for the design structure of enterprise reporting
portals. We conclude by carefully considering
the derived insights in the face of practical
implications imposed by our concept for the
application of Social Software techniques within
the reporting domain.
2. Related Work
Recent approaches from the field of Social
Software have become increasingly popular
within BI design research. Most publications
emphasise the potential of using collaborative
technologies for joint analysis ([2], [10], [9]) or
the usage of corresponding information systems
as data sources for reporting applications [8].
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Proceedings of the ITI 2009 31
st
Int. Conf. on Information Technology Interfaces, June 22-25, 2009, Cavtat, Croatia