Product Description

Maximize your Business Intelligence ROI

This book will help business decision-makers and Business Intelligence professionals get the most value out of their BI investments. You will learn about the components of a BI architecture, how to choose the appropriate tools and technologies, and how to roll out a BI strategy throughout the organization. Chapters include case studies and best practices that explain how successful companies execute on the topic at hand.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #19896 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 244 pages

From the Back Cover

In today's highly competitive global economy, actionable business intelligence (BI) is crucial to success. Yet while many companies have made substantial investments in BI infrastructure, few employees are taking advantage of the powerful BI tools they have at their fingertips. This is because technology is only part of a truly successful, company-wide BI strategy. Executive support, an analytic culture, and strong business-IT partnerships and collaboration are among the many other facets that make up a winning end-to-end BI initiative.

Written by industry analyst and BI consultant Cindi Howson, Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App reveals how to get the most value out of your BI investments. The book draws on exclusive survey data and real-world case studies of BI success stories at Continental Airlines, The Dow Chemical Company, Corporate Express, 1-800 CONTACTS, and other companies to identify proven BI best practices you can put to use in your organization, including:

• Gaining executive support and aligning your BI strategy with business goals
• Organizing BI teams and experts for success
• Choosing the best BI tools to meet user and business needs
• Improving data quality so decision-makers trust the BI solution
• Finding the relevance of BI to all employees, including front-line workers
• Using agile development processes to deliver BI capabilities and improvements at the speed of business
• Measuring success in multiple ways

Business intelligence has the power to change people's way of working, to enable businesses to compete more effectively and efficiently, and to help non-profits stretch their dollars further. Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App holds the key to bringing technological innovations together with the people, processes, and culture of any organization in order to achieve a competitive and profitable BI strategy.

About the Author

Cindi Howson is the founder of BIScorecard, a website for in-depth BI product reviews, and has 15 years of BI and management reporting experience. She writes and blogs for Intelligent Enterprise, and is an instructor for The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI). Prior to founding BIScorecard, Cindi was a manager at Deloitte & Touche and a BI standards leader for a Fortune 500 company. She has an MBA from Rice University

Customer Reviews

A practical guide to implementing business intelligence
There are many books on the market which tell you how to design and implement the technology to support business intelligence. This book is not one of them. Rather, it is a rarer and more important book which tells you about why business intelligence is needed and how it should work in your organisation.

Too much of the literature available concentrates on the technology and sidelines the important issue of business intelligence, i.e., providing information which can be used to make decisions. Certainly, the technology is covered in the book but it is always placed in the wider context.

The recommendations in the book are based on primary research conducted by the author as well as her own personal experience. This gives the advice more authenticity than it being based purely on academic theory or the self-interest of particular software firms.

The weakness of the book (and why I've only given it four stars) is that, where there is discussion of software tools, it is very much about the current versions. This, I feel, will make it appear out-dated quite quickly. However, this should be no reason for not reading it.

Not really what I wanted
This isn't really what I wanted. It is at too high a level. I wanted something rather closer to explaining how a business might use BI to achieve its goals - a lesson in how business works. This is more about how to set up a project to be successful to the business. Despite what I have just written, I have found some of the content interesting and do not regret buying the book.