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: agile business intelligence, enterprise business intelligence, managed
SaaS business intelligence, open source business intelligence, and predictive
analytics and text mining.
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 such as inventory finance and diversified financial products.
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 “Hybrid BI Organizations: Managing the Trade-offs between Central and Distributed
Development,” Wayne Eckerson, director of TDWI Research, explains how to
deliver the benefits of centralized BI even if your organization and BI architecture
are scattered and nonaligned. Eckerson writes that it’s not easy to create an agile
BI environment that meets business needs quickly without undermining information
consistency—but he offers tips to resolve the tension.
This issue of What Works also features an article from Eckerson’s blog, Wayne’s
World. In “Seven Strategies for Creating High-Performance BI Teams,” Eckerson
provides seven steps to help BI teams transform into high-performance organizations
that enjoy sustained success.
TDWI RESEARCH
There’s more from TDWI Research. What Works includes excerpts from TDWI’s
recent Best Practices Reports, Transforming Finance and BI on a Limited Budget,
both by Wayne Eckerson.
BEST PRACTICES AWARDS 2010
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]
This article originally appeared in the issue of .