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This month we link to an article of ours recently
published in DM Review's DM Direct,
From Peanuts to Profits.
Keep an eye out for
our series on Data Integration in DM Review's
print magazine, starting in the fall.
We also now have a monthly
column called BI Briefs published on
DMReview.com the 3rd Friday of the month.
Commentary - BI
as a Smart Investment
One of my "hobbies"
is investing. Hey, we were all experts at this
in the late 1990s, right?
Among the investing
websites I look at is Reuter's Multex Investor.
One of their recent articles mentioned business
intelligence as one of the areas in which
it makes most sense for a business to invest.
It's a nice surprise
to see a non-technical publication writing about
business intelligence. It's even nicer when they
understand the value it brings to an organization.
Here's what they had to say (a link to the complete
article follows):
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Previous Issues
of Business Intelligence Briefs
Mars,
Venus, and a Successful Business Intelligence
(BI) Architecture (May 2003)
The
Four Legs of a Successful Business Intelligence
Project Team (April 2003)
TDWI 2003 World Conference
August 17-22, Boston, MA
 Rick
Sherman will be teaching the following courses
at TDWI:
Enterprise
Reporting and Analytics Using ERP and Data Warehousing,
TDWI Night School, August 20
Establishing
Information as a Corporate Asset Using a Data
Integration Framework, TDWI Night
School, August 21
Peer Networking
Session: Revitalizing the Mature Data Warehouse.
August 18, 5:30–6:45 P.M.
Register &
Pay Before July 18, 2003, and Receive the Early
Bird Discount and Bonus Gift! |
Business-intelligence
products are hot
Equally
important for investors to remember is that not every
software maker is going to sink in a low-spending environment.
Investors need to figure out which companies will get
the dollars that are being spent.
Petersen
says that, right now, it'll be business-intelligence
software companies like Cognos (COGN), Business Objects
(BOBJ), Hyperion Solutions (HYSL), and MicroStrategy
(MSTR).
"Business
intelligence is outperforming because companies are
having to make decisions about where to cut costs, and
are finding that they don't have the tools to effectively
make those decisions," he said. "It's an easy
call to spend $100,000 on business intelligence software
that could save you $10 million."
Business-intelligence
products are also hot right now because they are priced
several hundred thousand dollars lower than projects
from higher-end providers like Siebel and PeopleSoft,
he noted.
"Also
with business intelligence, you don't have to tear out
any existing systems," Petersen said. "It
leverages an existing investment, and therefore it's
easier to justify spending the money on it."
complete
article, Technology: A hard landing for software?
>>>
feature article:
From Peanuts to Profits - Delivering
Long-Term ROI in Business Intelligence
by Rick
Sherman, Athena IT Solutions
It’s a big, fat waste. Millions
of dollars have been invested in enterprise resource
planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM),
supply chain management (SCM), data warehousing and
enterprise reporting.
And for what? Despite these investments
and the promises of providing the “single version
of the truth,” business people still can’t
kick the Microsoft Excel/Access habit. They’re
creating their budgets, business plans, sales reports
and profitability analysis with spreadsheets that require
manual data entry. They gather sales, customer and product
data from multiple sources, then waste time debating
whether the data is accurate.
Meanwhile, terabytes of data stored
in ERP, CRM, SCM, data warehouses and data marts sit
idle. Why do business users spend their time gathering,
massaging and debating data rather than analyzing it?
Complete
article >>>
© 2003 Athena IT Solutions
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