TDWI | Training & Research | Business Intelligence, Analytics, Big Data, Data Warehousing

From the Editor

• By James E. Powell
• April 9, 2007

In this issue we take a closer look at the 3Ms of data. No, I’m not talking about the company that makes those sticky notes affixed to your monitor (with data from phone numbers to shopping lists). I’m talking about modeling, managing, and merging.

Larissa T. Moss notes how enterprise data modeling’s small impact on development led to its bad rap, and how new disciplines—from metadata administration to data governance—are emerging with the same goal: to create and maintain unique, accurate, reusable, and traceable data assets.

Jeff Reagan and Ian Rowlands explain the changes—big changes—impacting data management. With ever-growing compliance and regulatory pressures facing CIOs, data lineage and metadata management initiatives are today’s “must haves” to help an organization understand its data. The authors look closely at these two key enabling technologies. Also on the subject of management, Anurag Wadehra looks at the business value of master data management and how to get started enjoying its benefits.

Merging data can be a complex problem, as USF Health discovered. Our first case study explains how their project’s bottom line was to make life easier for financial staff who had to pull together data from several sources. Our second case study also focuses at merging data—combining transaction data with geographic business intelligence, analyzing where customers live and what they might buy. Our book excerpt from Jill Dyché and Evan Levy explores a different kind of merging, as the book’s title makes clear: customer data integration.

Also in this issue, our BI experts suggest how you can get a BI center of excellence up and running, avoiding those ugly political potholes along the way.

Keeping us up to date on the latest in BI products and trends, Paul Gray and senior editor Hugh J. Watson explore technologies (such as visualization and real-time decisioning) and vendor activity (including Google and Microsoft) in the rapidly changing world of business intelligence and data warehousing. Also in the BI forefront: Robert Stackowiak examines what’s driving real-time BI and at the benefits promised by pervasive BI.

Speaking of changes, Ken Rudin delves into the increasing interest in on-demand BI, noting how the focus on the on-demand industry has moved from transactional applications to BI itself. In fact, Ken introduces another important “M” in this issue, explaining how on-demand BI is a mindset, not a feature set.

As always, I’m interested in your comments. Please send me your feedback: [email protected].

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This article originally appeared in the issue of TDWI.