December 5, 2011
To attain the full potential of your dimensional model, it is necessary to master a broad range of principles, understand how and what to model, and avoid lapsing into habits from other modeling disciplines. A dimensional model of your business is an important asset of your BI program. Maximize its value by avoiding these 10 mistakes.
September 12, 2011
The upsides to cloud business intelligence are easy to identify, but like any other solution, you need a strategy before you begin your research to identify the right solution for your company. Skipping the due-diligence phase with cloud solutions can be just as costly as with traditional on-premises solutions.
June 20, 2011
To identify where many agile BI/DW practitioners and managers have erred, we will examine the 10 items found in the Agile Manifesto and consider ways to rethink or rebalance each concept as a path to an even more effective second decade of accelerated BI/DW programs.
March 21, 2011
Gathering requirements is the most critical step in any project, and certainly for a data warehouse project. A data warehouse should deliver an environment that empowers the business community rather than an application system that accurately performs specific business functions. This difference in approach will change the way you go about gathering requirements.
December 6, 2010
Data federation is a relatively new form of data integration, but it has achieved a significant role in today’s data management strategies. Data federation allows data integration teams to quickly create virtually integrated sets of data for many purposes—business intelligence (BI), customer relationship management (CRM), master data management (MDM), and so on.
September 13, 2010
Master data management (MDM) is all about change—and change is difficult. If you want your company to be different and respond quickly to signals from the outside world, internal changes, and master data opportunities, you know what you have to do. Dig in, dig deep, and become an MDM evangelist!
June 14, 2010
Predictive analytics is the goal-driven analysis of large data sets. A predictive analytics model is a surrogate for a human decision process within an organization; its goal is to target an organization’s resources for changes that enhance business objectives. This article presents 10 common mistakes organizations make when undertaking predictive analytics projects.
March 22, 2010
A successful BI program should not be judged solely on an organization's ability to develop and deploy a solution on time and within budget. Successful BI should be measured by the value and direct business impact it brings to the organization through its adoption and use by key stakeholders. After all, BI is about making information readily available to provide new insights, enable fact-based decisions, and improve actions.
December 7, 2009
In virtually every data warehouse implementation, you can find the products of dimensional design: the star schema, the snowflake, or the cube. Despite this near-universal acceptance, the basic principles of dimensional design are commonly misunderstood and misapplied.
September 1, 2009
Operational BI has had a dramatic impact on traditional BI environments and on a new audience of BI users. These users now have immediate access to the insights they need when making decisions about customers, products, and evencampaigns while these business activities are happening.