“This readable, practical book helps business people quickly understand what business intelligence is, how it works, where it's used, and why and when to use it—all illustrated by real case studies, not just theory.” Nigel Pendse Author of The OLAP Report www.olapreport.com So much information, so little time. All too often, business data is hard to get at and use—thus slowing decision-making to a crawl. This insightful book illustrates how organizations can make better, faster decisions about their customers, partners, and operations by turning mountains of data into valuable business information that’s always at the fingertips of decision makers. You’ll learn what’s involved in using business intelligence to bring together information, people, and technology to create successful business strategies—and how to execute those strategies with confidence. Topics covered include: THE BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE MINDSET: Discover the basics behind business intelligence, such as how it’s defined, why and how to use it in your organization, and what characteristics, components, and general architecture most business intelligence solutions share. THE CASE FOR BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE: Read how world leaders in finance, manufacturing, and retail have successfully implemented business intelligence solutions and see what benefits they have reaped. THE PRACTICE OF BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE: Find out what’s involved in implementing a business intelligence solution in your organization, including how to identify your business intelligence opportunities, what decisions you must make to get a business intelligence project going, and what to do to sustain the momentum so that you can continue to make sense of all the data you gather.

This book illustrates how organizations can make better, faster decisions about their customers, partners, and operations by turning mountains of data into valuable business information that's at the fingertips of decision makers. It describes what's involved in using business intelligence to bring together information, people, and technology to create successful business strategies-and how to execute those strategies with confidence. Real-life case studies show how world leaders in finance, manufacturing, and retail have successfully implemented business intelligence solutions and detail the benefits they have reaped.

This software will enable the user to learn about business intelligence roadmap.

The disciplines of strategic intelligence at the governmental level and competitive business intelligence constitute accepted methods of decision-supporting to prevent mistakes and strategic surprise. This research discovered that many researchers in the intelligence field feel that intelligence methodology in both contexts has reached a “glass ceiling.” Thus far, research has focused separately on national intelligence and intelligence in business, without any attempt to benchmark from one field to the other. This book shows that it is possible to use experience gained in the business field to improve intelligence practices in national security, and vice versa through mutual learning. The book’s main innovation is its proposition that mutual learning can be employed in the context of a model distinguishes between concentrated and diffused surprises to provide a breakthrough in the intelligence field, thereby facilitating better prediction of the surprise development. We Never Expected That: A Comparative Study of Failures in National and Business Intelligence focuses on a comparison between how states, through their intelligence organizations, cope with strategic surprises and how business organizations deal with unexpected movement in their field. Based on this comparison, the author proposes a new model which can better address the challenge of avoiding strategic surprises. This book can contribute significantly to the study of intelligence, which will become more influential in the coming years.

This book examines common tasks performed by business analysts and helps the reader navigate the wealth of information in R and its 4000 packages to create useful analytics applications. Includes interviews with corporate users of R, and easy-to-use examples.

Design, Build, and Manage High-Value BI Solutions with SQL Server 2005 In this book, two of Microsoft’s leading consultants illustrate how to use SQL Server 2005 Business Intelligence (BI) technologies to solve real-world problems in markets ranging from retail and finance to healthcare. Drawing on extensive personal experience with Microsoft’s strategic customers, John C. Hancock and Roger Toren offer unprecedented insight into BI systems design and step-by-step best practices for implementation, deployment, and management. Hancock and Toren introduce practical BI concepts and terminology and provide a concise primer on the Microsoft BI platform. Next, they turn to the heart of the book–constructing solutions. Each chapter-length case study begins with the customer’s business goals, and then guides you through detailed data modeling. The case studies show how to avoid the pitfalls that derail many BI projects. You’ll translate each model into a working system and learn how to deploy it into production, maintenance, and efficient operation. Whether you’re a decision-maker, architect, developer, or DBA, this book brings together all the knowledge you’ll need to derive maximum business value from any BI project. • Leverage SQL Server 2005 databases, Integration Services, Analysis Services, and Reporting Services • Build data warehouses and extend them to support very large databases • Design effective Analysis Services databases • Ensure the superior data quality your BI system needs • Construct advanced enterprise scorecard applications • Use data mining to segment customers, cross-sell, and increase the value of each transaction • Design real-time BI applications • Get hands-on practice with SQL Server 2005’s BI toolset

Clear your doubts about Business Intelligence and start your new journey KEY FEATURES ● Includes successful methods and innovative ideas to achieve success with BI. ● Vendor-neutral, unbiased, and based on experience. ● Highlights practical challenges in BI journeys. ● Covers financial aspects along with technical aspects. ● Showcases multiple BI organization models and the structure of BI teams. DESCRIPTION The book demystifies misconceptions and misinformation about BI. It provides clarity to almost everything related to BI in a simplified and unbiased way. It covers topics right from the definition of BI, terms used in the BI definition, coinage of BI, details of the different main uses of BI, processes that support the main uses, side benefits, and the level of importance of BI, various types of BI based on various parameters, main phases in the BI journey and the challenges faced in each of the phases in the BI journey. It clarifies myths about self-service BI and real-time BI. The book covers the structure of a typical internal BI team, BI organizational models, and the main roles in BI. It also clarifies the doubts around roles in BI. It explores the different components that add to the cost of BI and explains how to calculate the total cost of the ownership of BI and ROI for BI. It covers several ideas, including unconventional ideas to achieve BI success and also learn about IBI. It explains the different types of BI architectures, commonly used technologies, tools, and concepts in BI and provides clarity about the boundary of BI w.r.t technologies, tools, and concepts. The book helps you lay a very strong foundation and provides the right perspective about BI. It enables you to start or restart your journey with BI. WHAT YOU WILL LEARN ● Builds a strong conceptual foundation in BI. ● Gives the right perspective and clarity on BI uses, challenges, and architectures. ● Enables you to make the right decisions on the BI structure, organization model, and budget. ● Explains which type of BI solution is required for your business. ● Applies successful BI ideas. WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR This book is a must-read for business managers, BI aspirants, CxOs, and all those who want to drive the business value with data-driven insights. TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. What is Business Intelligence? 2. Why do Businesses need BI? 3. Types of Business Intelligence 4. Challenges in Business Intelligence 5. Roles in Business Intelligence 6. Financials of Business Intelligence 7. Ideas for Success with BI 8. Introduction to IBI 9. BI Architectures 10. Demystify Tech, Tools, and Concepts in BI