Letter from the Editorial Director
This new edition of What Works in Enterprise Business Intelligence offers a fresh, topically focused collection of customer success stories and expert perspectives. We’re proud to offer this resource to enhance your understanding of the tools, technologies,and methods that are central to enterprise business intelligence today. We’ve arranged these case studies and lessons from the experts into specific categories to guide you through the articles: dashboards, scorecards, and visualization; enterprise business intelligence; open source business intelligence; and software-as-a-service.
Here’s what you will find inside:
CASE STUDIES
What Works case studies are meant to present snapshots of the most innovative BI and DW implementations in the industry today. The case studies included in this volume demonstrate the power of enterprise business intelligence technologies and solutions for industries ranging from restaurants to the YMCA.
LESSONS FROM THE EXPERTS
Included in this issue of What Works are articles from leading experts in the services, software, and hardware vendor communities. These lessons provide perspectives about enterprise business intelligence best practices and trends.
FEATURE ARTICLES
In “The End of Enterprise Software: Open Source Finds an Opening,” Wayne Eckerson,director of TDWI Research, details why interest in open source BI tools skyrocketed as the economy plummeted. Eckerson writes that there will be an inexorable rise in the adoption of open source technologies due to their significant cost savings over established BI vendors.
This issue of What Works also features articles from TDWI’s bimonthly e-newsletter, BI This Week. In “BI or Bust Study Highlights Best Practices for a Tough Economy,”James E. Powell details Aberdeen Group’s latest survey, and “Text Analytics to the Rescue” by Stephen Swoyer offers a rundown of the 2009 edition of “Text Analytics: User Perspectives on Solutions and Providers.”
TDWI RESEARCH
There’s more from TDWI Research. What Works includes an excerpt from TDWI’srecent Best Practices Report, Beyond Reporting: Delivering Insights with Next-GenerationAnalytics, by Wayne Eckerson.
BEST PRACTICES AWARDS 2009
This section features summaries of the winning solutions of TDWI’s annual contest, which recognizes organizations for developing and implementing world-class business intelligence and data warehousing solutions.
We hope you enjoy this collection of case studies, best practices, and expert insight focused on enterprise business intelligence. We look forward to your comments. If there is anything we can do to make this publication more valuable to you, please let us know. And please join me in thanking the companies that have shared their stories and successes, their technology insights, and the lessons they have learned.
Denelle Hanlon
Editorial Director, What Works in Enterprise Business Intelligence
TDWI
[email protected]