March 27, 2013
For decades, executives have complained that they’re drowning in
data, yet lack focused insights. If executives don’t want to get lost
in the sea of information, they need BI platforms that leverage big
data in order to gain focused insights.
On the one hand, many executives today have relatively good
technical skills when given the right tools for business intelligence
(BI) and data warehousing (DW). This growing class of executives
wants to do a certain amount of data exploration, sandbox
development, data visualization, and other self-service BI tasks (as
described later in this report). On the other hand, the majority of
executives still depend on technical personnel, who must package
and present big data and findings drawn from it in forms that
executives are accustomed to.
In both cases, organizations need a simpler, more cost-effective
approach to exploring big data and turning its raw information
into business insights that are easily consumed by executive
users—and nothing is more critical to that end than the executive
dashboard.
This TDWI Checklist Report describes a BI environment and its
attendant best practices that can greatly simplify executives’
access to big data and enhance their consumption of insights
and metrics that come out of big data and similar data sets. The
sections of this report list and discuss the highest priorities for
such an environment and the successful solutions built atop it.