From the Editor
Location, location, location—we’ve all heard the mantra. In this issue, Ed Gandorf and James Taylor show how location information can drive decision automation. Connecting existing corporate information with data such as ZIP codes or addresses can reveal trends and patterns in many BI applications. The authors provide three industry examples.
Two authors look at pushing BI to more locations. Harriet Fryman knows that IT has limited resources for broad BI deployment and business users may not easily adopt new initiatives. She offers four key strategies to drive broader user adoption while minimizing IT complexity. Paul Zangaglia exposes the myriad issues and constraints an organization must tackle when designing a BI solution. He introduces a matrix to help match business requirements to pragmatic approaches for successful BI implementations.
With over 1,250 locations, the International House of Pancakes restaurant chain slowly developed issues with its data quality. In one of two case studies in this issue, we explain how the company worked to gain consistency in its BI reporting and in its restaurants.
Rather than spreading out, several of our authors look at bringing ideas and resources together.
Aiman Zeid provides a blueprint for developing and deploying a BI competency center—a small team of experts to address strategic and tactical areas of a BI project. Mark N. Frolick and Mark von Oven have integration on their minds. They examine how professionals in R&D undertake their work without an overall vision of how applications fit together, which IT must then tackle. They explore a Connections Gateway concept that melds relational database concepts with the power and flexibility of Web services.
M. Kathryn Brohman and Senior Editor Hugh J. Watson show how matching analyst skills with the different needs of OLAP and data mining projects can maximize your BI investment through an organization’s human resources.
In this issue we also explore BI at the college and university level and offer a case study that describes how an eastern U.S. power company improved its financial reporting and analysis, streamlined reporting, and provided a central repository for business-unit budgeting.
As always, we’re interested in your comments. Please send me your feedback: [email protected].
James E. Powell is the editorial director of the Business Intelligence Journal.
[email protected]
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This article originally appeared in the issue of TDWI.