The Business Intelligence space is one fraught with vendors, tools, and opinions of how best to implement BI solutions. This book addresses key areas of BI such as data structure and delivery, tools evaluation, and more. The subject areas are presented from the author's point of view and experiences. At the heart of the materials are points to ponder, food for thought, and significant errors to avoid. Business Intelligence is the conscious, methodical transformation of data from any and all data sources into new forms to provide information that is business driven and results oriented. It will often encompass a mixture of tools, databases, vendors in order to deliver an infrastructure that not only will deliver the initial solution, but it will incorporate the ability to change with the business and current marketplace. The purpose of investing in BI is to transform from an environment that is reactive to data to one that is proactive. A major goal of the solution will be to automate and integrate as many steps and functions as possible. Another goal is to provide data analytics that are as tool independent as possible.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0
not quite the mark of today:
This book has issues. 1. Some items discussed are really dated. It should be updated with newer BI strategies, and cover more dashboard and WEB 2.0 technologies.
2. The author is very knowledgeable and lays out complex topics in easy to understand parts, so it is even more important to allow for an update.
3. Being used as textbook as it was in a course in BI recently, there should be more examples and online source material available.
4. More Agile development should be included.
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Useful because it's non-technical:
I think most IT people would agree that technology efforts, especially those in the area of BI, are first and foremost people efforts. This book focuses on the cultural and social aspects of BI, which are the bedrock for starting and finishing a perpetually useful initiative. This is highly recommended reading for anyone, regardless of experience, who wonders how so many BI projects can fail, and how to help make their own projects succeed.
Good for managers, too generic to be used by DW developers:
The author is an IBM veteran who spent more than 20 years in the sales and product support divisions, except for a short period in a company specialized in Data Warehousing, so he naturally puts in this book a lot of his experiences and he also describes the history of BI in terms of architectures and technologies. I had the impression that the target audience is mainly made by managers involved in BI projects, on either sides (vendors, consulting companies, customers). One obvious comment from an... more info
A thoughtful and thought-provoking book about BI ...:
The tji-Boston reviewer is dead-on correct that this is a frank discussion about BI. Biere will help you to think about BI, and he will help you to think clearly.
Business Intelligence for the Enterprise is written for the customer. The author is a sales guy, who works for a vendor (IBM - Good Grief!), AND he has written a book for the customer. Why?
He is obviously interested in seeing Enterprise BI succeed.
This book will help you think through sales hype, and move closer to success. In a certain... more info
