Data Discovery
3 Steps to Better Decision Making

As Gartner reported in its 2012 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms* report, "Data discovery alternatives to enterprise BI platforms offer highly interactive and graphical user interfaces built on in-memory architectures to address business users' unmet ease-of-use and rapid deployment needs. What began as a market buying trend in 2010 has only continued to expand.".

More and more data discovery tools are helping organizations transform the volumes of data they produce and collect into a revenue-enhancing resource. Yet many organizations are only scratching the surface when it comes to employing this form of business intelligence, missing opportunities to identify trends, surface business opportunities, reduce losses, and answer critical business questions. Too often, critical data remains locked in obscurity.

By the time you finish reading this sentence your number one competitor has stolen away another customer, increased their revenues and created a new service in your industry, all based on their better information architecture. Your other competitors are right behind them, using data models to improve their bottom lines, reduce risk, and decrease expenses.

Gain Insights with Business Analytics and Optimization

Optimizing a business with analytics requires far more than just technology. It calls for a commitment to change, a willingness to adjust business processes that may be near and dear to key stakeholders. It means getting down to the brass tacks of what makes an organization work – process. It also requires the keystone that opens new doors: analytics.

Sponsored by presented by Mobile Business Intelligence: New Places, New People, New Answers

One of the hottest new trends in business intelligence is the advent of mobile solutions. But mobile is different than other hot new BI trends of recent years: unlike real time data, open source platforms, or new data warehouse architectures, mobile BI is all about the end user, not the data or the technology. As such it has the potential to dramatically change the experience of every existing BI consumer as well as create a vast new set of BI consumers who are empowered and informed.

Don't Let Your Governance Program Derail

The success of your governance program may be jeopardized by many factors including complexity of the initiative, lack of executive support and/or internal resources, organizational culture and data integrity issues. Those issues can be addressed with careful planning and recruitment efforts, but for your efforts to have the most impact they must be considered within the context of your organizational environment. This e-book provides instruction on how to ramp up buy-in, and educate, communicate and ultimately establish responsibility and accountability for your governance program.

The Era of KPIs is Over

Key Performance Indicators, also known as KPIs, have become part of the canon of management practice over the last few decades. The idea is that you define a set of key metrics: for example, new customers, customer churn and bad debts; and run your business by them.

When KPIs first came out they were a great innovation. They helped companies identify the driving forces of their businesses and standardize on a set of metrics to define success. Most companies went through a useful process of defining KPIs, creating scorecards, and implementing a regular scorecard review process.

The problem is, KPIs don’t work anymore.

In this eBook, you'll gain insight to:

• What's changed?
• Articles
• Viewpoints on successful BI
• Online resources and more

The buzz about Master Data Management (MDM) keeps growing, as does the action. We've blown past the hype cycle, and are now witnessing widespread adoption of MDM as an enterprise solution ... with varying degrees of success. Whether your program succeeds and continues to expand will depend heavily upon several factors:

• Securing "wins" on a regular basis
• Maintaining strong executive support
• Letting data drive program expansion
• Keeping things simple by minimizing complexity
• Knowing when and where to go next

In this eBook, we'll try to outline the most important considerations to keep in mind when taking your MDM program to the next level.

Analysts with Forrester Research are predicting the cloud computing market to reach $241 billion by 2020. This is a trend that is rapidly gaining adoption by a wide range of businesses. There is a lot of buzz around cloud computing – what it is, how it works and who should use it. These are serious questions and the answers have long-term ramifications. This eBook takes a look at explaining the idea of cloud and some of the organizations that are moving their analysis off premises. This eBook presents two points of view from well respected industry experts. Robin Bloor presents the challenges and benefits of cloud computing adoption in Eric Kavanagh’s interview with him. Jim Ericson shares his observations.

Over the past few years, many organizations that have begun implementing data warehouses are taking stock of what they've built. There are many reasons to reevaluate the existing architectures. In some cases, the data warehouse was built for a specific set of end users and doesn't provide value across the organization. Others report serious performance degradation issues as older systems are forced to handle large and diverse data volumes, growing numbers of users, and increasingly complex queries. Some problems are occurring because business questions cannot be answered in a reasonable length of time due to the integration, aggregation and modeling of data required.

This eBook examines the reasons why it might be time for you to consider a move to a new database platform and suggests some strategies for migrating data warehouses from Oracle to a Teradata platform. Performance, cost, and simplicity are just a few of the business drivers behind a decision of this magnitude.

Learn about:

• Motivations and approaches to data warehouse migrations
• Data warehouse migration strategies and lessons learned
• Best practices and keys to success
• Technical solutions