Business Intelligence: Executive Report Abstracts

2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001

Harnessing the Power of Virtual Worlds: Exploration, Innovation, and Transformation -- Part I (Vol. 8, No. 3)

Have you ever "traveled" into a virtual world? If not, you will sooner or later, as you will be required to leverage the opportunities this new technology offers to you and your enterprise. To succeed in virtual worlds, you need a critical understanding of their intricacies, advancements, and promises. This Executive Report by San Murugesan, the first in a two-part series on virtual environments, takes you through a comprehensive tour of these worlds and explains what occurs in them.

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2008 | Volume 8
Developing Core Application Systems for the 21st Century (Vol. 8, No. 2)

In this Executive Report, Ken Orr discusses the major sets of options currently available to business and IT planners today concerning their current legacy systems: leave them alone, replace them with COTS, replace them with open source applications and components, or replace them with state-of-the-art service-oriented architecture (SOA) or cloud applications. The report suggests that there are problems with all of these approaches and discusses the primary characteristics that the core application systems of the 21st century should include. Principal among these characteristics are that they should: (1) be platform-agnostic, (2) utilize agile development environments, and (3) be semantically aware.

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Content Management in the Enterprise (Vol. 8, No. 1)

Content management represents a critical area of infrastructure for the enterprise. As content becomes digitized, managed, and accessible through portals, the advantages of bringing most if not all content under a single management scheme become more apparent. There are significant overlaps among all content types, and a given project is likely to include information from a multitude of sources. To meet the needs of a future increasingly dominated by compliance issues and Enterprise 2.0 concerns, improved content management has become imperative, which is why it is the focus of this Executive Report by Brian J. Dooley.

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2007 | Volume 7
Semantic Data Models (Vol. 7, No. 12)

Every day it seems we hear more and more about the Semantic Web. We have been expecting intelligent applications, automation, and more efficient information systems. But what is the Semantic Web made of? In this Executive Report by Paola Di Maio, we introduce and discuss semantic data models as they lie at the heart of semantic architectures. We also look at the evolution of semantic data models and their relevance to organizations today.

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Putting Data into SOA: Data Virtualization, Data Buses, and Enterprise Data Management (Vol. 7, No. 11)

One element in all of the discussions of service-oriented architecture (SOA) implementation has been neglected -- data. This Executive Report by Ken Orr highlights the major dimensions of what I consider SOA architecture, focusing heavily on the critical importance of data architecture in SOA governance, planning, and implementation.

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Your Guide to Understanding the Evolution, Power, and Potential of Online Social Networks: Part II (Vol. 7, No. 10)

How can you harness the power of social networks to your advantage? Has the hype around social networks gone too far? Blindly creating or adopting social networking sites won’t yield the outcomes you desire and may even be counterproductive. But you can leverage the power of the network -- the strength of the weak ties -- in innovative ways. This Executive Report, the second in a two-part series by San Murugesan, examines key challenges in harnessing social networks, identifies emerging trends, and explores the opportunities social networks present for you and your enterprise.

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Your Guide to Understanding the Evolution, Power, and Potential of Online Social Networks: Part I (Vol. 7, No. 9)

Have you joined the social networking bandwagon? If not, it's a pretty safe bet that you will sooner or later. A critical understanding of the continuing advances in social networks is essential to leverage the opportunities this new online forum offers to you and your enterprise. This Executive Report, the first in a two-part series by San Murugesan, takes a comprehensive look at social networks and analyzes their pros and cons. Part II will explore how you can harness social networks to your advantage.

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Get Ready to Embrace Web 3.0 (Vol. 7, No. 8)

Web 2.0 has had a significant impact on both society and business, so what's next in the Web's evolution? What else? Web 3.0! Though views vary on what Web 3.0 is, or might be, and on what it might offer, Web 3.0 promises another Internet revolution. It's time for enterprises -- both IT and non-IT -- to begin harnessing Web 3.0 to their advantage. This Executive Report by San Murugesan explores the Web 3.0 arena, examines its prospects and potential, and helps you ride the next Web wave.

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Ontology: Making the Business Case (Vol. 7, No. 7)

Ontology has become an "in" thing for business intelligence professionals. Yet understanding what an ontology is, and what it isn't, why it is suddenly a priority, and how to apply it requires quite a bit of reading, thinking, and discussing. This Executive Report by Paola Di Maio offers a straightforward summary of the essential points regarding ontology to help business intelligence executives make their next strategic move.

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Leveraging Peer Production: An Open Door? (Vol. 7, No. 6)

The enormous coverage of the "open" and "user-driven" phenomena in business and technology media makes it difficult for business decision makers to separate hype from reality and to see the practical implications of interesting ideas. This Executive Report by Joseph Feller examines open source software, open content, and the emergence of mashups using "open" Web services as examples of peer production, and discusses the business implications of this emerging form of innovation and development.

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Web and Enterprise 2.0: A Reasoned Perspective (Vol. 7, No. 5)

Has the hype around Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 gone too far? Is Web 2.0 revolutionary or evolutionary? Should businesses boldly move forward with Web 2.0 initiatives, or is pausing a sign of healthy skepticism? The economics of information is often counterintuitive. Blindly adopting Web 2.0 techniques without understanding how your organization profits from information may be foolish. This Executive Report by Vince Kellen examines the slippery and paradoxical nature of the information fueling Web 2.0 and takes a harsh look at some of the claims Web 2.0 proponents have made by shedding new light on this debate.

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Best Practices for Collaboration with Wikis (Vol. 7, No. 4)

While still not mainstream, the popularity of wikis is increasing. This Executive Report by Mark Choate discusses how organizations are using wikis to their advantage and offers guidance to those looking to launch a wiki in a corporate environment. In addition to defining a wiki and its features, the report identifies five characteristics that can help to ensure a successful wiki.

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Operational Business Intelligence: Taking the Pulse of the Enterprise (Vol. 7, No. 3)

Recent advances in business intelligence (BI), data warehousing, business process management, and enterprise application integration have come together to make it possible for companies to apply real-time analytics (that is, "operational BI") to monitor the daily business activities and processes that impact the overall quality and operational efficiency of the organization.

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Open Source Business Intelligence (Vol. 7, No. 2)

Open source business intelligence has moved into the limelight with the recent release of software with improved functionality. Key features like standardization, simplicity, and cost are particularly attractive to smaller organizations and also helping to bring BI to areas where it might not have been considered previously. There is great promise in open source BI, but it needs to be considered carefully, as it is neither as free nor as simple as it might initially appear.

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Data Architecture, Data Warehousing, and Master Data Management (Vol. 7, No. 1)

In large organizations everywhere, there is increasing interest in data architecture and associated issues such as data warehousing strategies and master data management. This Executive Report by Ken Orr addresses the nature of data architecture, how "operational data" and "informational data" differ, and where data warehousing fits in. The report asserts that over the last 30-40 years, there has been a number of profound developments in data architecture: the emergence of database management systems; the emergence of relational database systems; and the emergence of data warehousing. Additionally, we discuss how master data management systems and data hubs are becoming mainstream ways of linking vital information.

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2006 | Volume 6
Do You Run from or to Embedded Business Intelligence? (Vol. 6, No. 12)

Today's CIOs face a new decision as they adopt vendor solutions such as ERP systems, finance applications, and CRM solutions. Vendors are starting to embed rich business intelligence (BI) capabilities within operational software or as an optional add-on component. The adoption of embedded BI has many implications to the broader BI portfolio of an organization, and CIOs must be prepared to carefully evaluate their adoption and integration strategy.

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Enhancing Collaboration in Organizations: Theories, Tools, Principles, and Practices (Vol. 6, No. 11)

Driven by leading-edge technologies yet not strictly a technology issue, online collaboration is becoming a key item in strategic management agendas. Leveraging the wealth of knowledge and resources locked in people's networks is becoming of critical importance. Before making technology and organizational decisions that could impact competitiveness for years to come, organizations will benefit from taking a step back and looking at the big picture. This Executive Report by Paola Di Maio discusses the diverse facets that make up collaboration.

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Social Media: A Revolution in the Making (Vol. 6, No. 10)

In less than a decade from its invention, blogging has become commonplace in contemporary culture. The impacts of this simple "self-publishing" model have already been enormous: journalism, politics, and the business of media have all been dramatically changed by the burgeoning blogosphere. In this Executive Report, Stowe Boyd, noted blogger and social tools analyst, explores the history, future, and present of social media, and examines its application in marketing and behind the firewall.

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Mobile Application Development: A Recipe for Success (Vol. 6, No. 9)

Establishment of a wireless infrastructure and deployment of mobile applications are becoming key strategic priorities for a growing number of enterprises in different industry sectors. Successful development and deployment of mobile applications is, however, more challenging than traditional computing or online applications. This Executive Report by San Murugesan examines the challenges, key considerations, and best practices in successfully designing, developing, and deploying mobile applications.

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Critically Thinking About CSFs in Enterprise Systems (Vol. 6, No. 8)

Critical success factor (CSF) literature pays too much attention to formal processes and too little attention to how these processes are used in situated practices. Based on evidence from the situated learning theory perspective, authors Sue Newell and Gary C. David suggest that encouraging informal processes provides a useful complement to this literature. In this Executive Report, the authors utilize an exploratory case study of a large consultancy firm that implemented a major enterprise system across its global business to examine whether and why CSFs are difficult to sustain. They also make recommendations regarding how a situated learning perspective can benefit organizations that are implementing an enterprise system.

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Semantics, Ontologies, and Data Modeling (Vol. 6, No. 7)

This Executive Report by David C. Hay brings together the discipline of conceptual data modeling with those of semantics and ontology by taking three sample data models and showing how they could be rendered in the new Web Ontology Language OWL. In the process, the reader will have the opportunity to see how the approaches are similar but also how they come from completely different views of the world.

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BPM in Peril -- Objects to the Rescue (Vol. 6, No. 6)

Both business process management (BPM) systems and the orchestration function of service-oriented architecture (SOA) are imperiled by the workflow implementation that they have inherited. They would do much better with an object/agent approach where process management (routing) is one of a constellation of interacting application functions that have intimate access to the data values that comprise the work that is being moved around. In this direction lie profoundly collaborative applications that are, as a side benefit, easy to think about, easy to build, and easy to maintain.

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Rules for the Knowledge Organization (Vol. 6, No. 5)

This Executive Report by Paola Di Maio analyzes rules and presents their relevance to knowledge organizations from different perspectives. It introduces different definitions and a historical context for rule-based systems, explaining how, if properly configured, they are particularly suitable to support current information systems environments, which are semantically rich, dynamically changing, and increasingly unpredictable. The report briefly explores some research trends and summarizes some useful approaches to help the reader think of different rule-based techniques as mechanisms to address dynamic complexity.

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Business Process Management: All Roads Converging on a New Technology Boomtown (Vol. 6, No. 4)

Business process management (BPM) serves as the master management layer controlling processes in applications in "interprises" with which it is integrated. It lets business users design processes, allows IT to execute them, uses business activity monitoring tools to monitor them in production, and uses simulation/optimization tools to test and upgrade them. While still integration-intensive, BPM promises to make business more agile, productive, innovative, and customer-responsive.

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The Role of Master Data Management in the Enterprise (Vol. 6, No. 3)

Old ideas reemerging under new names are no surprise in IT. This Executive Report by Al Moreno and Greg Mancuso discusses one of these concepts: master data management (MDM). What's new about MDM -- an enterprise's ability to deliver a consistent set of information across all the operational and reporting systems in an enterprise -- is that it is now viewed more broadly and is more important than ever.

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Knowledge Management Goes to Market (Vol. 6, No. 2)

Some managers who have attempted to leverage value from knowledge management (KM) initiatives have discovered that failure is often a result of: (1) an overintellectualization of the definition of knowledge that bogs the project down, or (2) the inability to encourage knowledge sharing amongst employees. This Executive Report by John Berry discusses a radical approach to jump-starting KM initiatives -- the use of market principles where employees "buy and sell" knowledge.

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Performance Management for the Business, Corporation, or Enterprise (Vol. 6, No. 1)

The performance management sector has seen significant growth during the past several years, though it has struggled to achieve a uniform definition. Business performance management (BPM) is the most prominent umbrella term. The goal of BPM is to provide real and immediate measures of how business processes are faring with respect to organizational strategy, aligned with methods for process improvement, to yield a more efficient, effective, and higher-quality outcome.

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2005 | Volume 5
The State of Open Source Workflow (Vol. 5, No. 12)

Open source (OS) workflow is now a viable contender in the workflow arena and has some concrete advantages over commercial systems: OS workflow products are easier to install and integrate, less proprietary, and have a lower total cost of ownership. OS workflow will succeed for strategic market reasons; it's poised to invade a market that commercial vendors may substantially abandon for a promising business process management one.

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Exposing and Overcoming the Dirty Secrets of Agile Development (Vol. 5, No. 11)

Agile software methods are extremely effective for producing high-quality software that meets user expectations. However, the ultimate success of your agile project is contingent upon a set of prerequisite elements that have not been deeply discussed in current agile literature. This Executive Report by Ken Collier and Luke Hohmann helps you lay the proper groundwork needed to ensure the success of your agile projects.

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Smart Products and Smart Networks (Vol. 5, No. 10)

Machines are already doing what humans used to do in a faster, cheaper, and more reliable manner. This Executive Report by Ken Orr discusses a "smart revolution," which is already underway, that points to a future world filled with smart products, smart networks, smart workers, and smart enterprises.

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Auto-ID Technology: Creating an Intelligent Infrastructure for Business (Vol. 5, No. 9)

Simply put, Auto-ID technology is a means to link physical objects to the Internet using low-cost radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. This Executive Report by Edmund W. Schuster looks at the evolution of information-gathering technology, from bar codes to Auto-ID; presents a case study of a company currently employing Auto-ID; and contemplates the direction in which Auto-ID is heading for the future.

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Using Enterprise Architecture to Build Enterprise-Wide, Integrated Portals (Vol. 5, No. 8)

Building on earlier Cutter Consortium research, this Executive Report by Clive Finkelstein discusses how enterprise architecture (EA) can be used to design and build enterprise portals that support an integrated enterprise. The report reviews EA alignment principles to help overcome common difficulties experienced in many enterprise portal environments, looks at the role of matrices, and examines the future technology and EA directions for enterprise portals.

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Business Semantics (Vol. 5, No. 7)

For the most part, today's information systems are not much more intelligent now than they were 30 or even 20 years ago. Many leading systems thinkers believe that the next big breakthrough will come in getting software to recognize concepts at a higher level -- to deal with the meaning of things and not just their form. Classically, the field of semantics deals with the study of meaning. This Executive Report by Ken Orr discusses business semantics categories and their importance in shaping next-generation information systems.

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Enterprise Decision Management (Vol. 5, No. 6)

Enterprise decision management (EDM) is emerging as an important discipline, due to an increasing need to automate high-volume decisions across the enterprise and to impart precision, consistency, and agility in the decision-making process. This Executive Report by Curt Hall examines EDM and its implementation via the use of rule-based systems and analytic models for enabling high-volume, automated decision making. It also provides an overview of available rule-based engines and other commercial EDM products and discusses several applications that are representative of how organizations are applying the technology.

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Free But Not Cheap: Open Source Content Management Systems (Vol. 5, No. 5)

With their lower cost and increased customization capability, open source content management systems (OS CMSs) are beginning to threaten traditional content management vendors. This Executive Report by John Harney examines OS CMSs, including their development, strengths and weaknesses, and features. It also profiles several OS CMSs and the companies that support them.

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Reorganizing Business for Collaboration (Vol. 5, No. 4)

The growing interest in collaboration is being driven by an increased use of groupware and other collaborative tools, a need to improve real-time operations in supply chains, and customer requirements for greater product diversity. This Executive Report by Brian J. Dooley discusses the benefits of collaboration, the environment necessary for its success, and the tools currently available.

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Foundation for Data Resource Quality (Vol. 5, No. 3)

In this Executive Report by Michael Brackett, a foundation is established for overall data resource quality that includes the common data architecture concept, the principles supporting the common data architecture, the 10 best practices for improving data resource quality, and guidelines about the impact and cost of data resource quality.

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A Strategy for Implementing BI/BPM to Gain Competitive Advantage (Vol. 5, No. 2)

With the dawn of e-commerce, companies have been forced to integrate business intelligence (BI) and business performance management (BPM) applications into their infrastructure. While the benefits of these new technologies far exceed the negatives, organizations must be aware of the substantial effort required in the successful deployment of these tools. This Executive Report by Greg Mancuso and Al Moreno explores the need for a reliable integration framework for these tools, the types of integration likely to be included in the process, and a method to deploy the framework.

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The Future of Connective Technology: Greater Integration Through Semantic Modeling (Vol. 5, No. 1)

Semantic modeling has great potential for dealing with the vast streams of new data that organizations will encounter in the future. Making semantic modeling a reality requires the development of a new set of computer languages and protocols, termed M, to connect models to other models, data to models, and data to data. This Executive Report by Edmund W. Schuster, Stuart J. Allen, David L. Brock, and Pinaki Kar discusses semantic modeling and prototype applications of M in ERP systems, retail operations, and agriculture.

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2004 | Volume 4
Agile Data Warehousing: Incorporating Agile Principles (Vol. 4, No. 12)

This Executive Report by Dr. Ken Collier and Jim Highsmith targets organizations that are considering a data warehousing project, organizations that have struggled to implement a data warehouse, data warehouse developers, and IT executives who are responsible for overseeing such projects. The report recommends a leaner approach than that of traditional methods; it advocates a working system that meets users' business needs rather than heavily process-centric development approaches that emphasize documentation and contractual agreements. Armed with the agile data warehousing approach, organizations can increase the likelihood of a successful data warehouse implementation on time and within budget.

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The Digital Age: Managing Digital Assets (Vol. 4, No. 11)

Our world has gone digital. Fast computers and fast communication have resulted in an abundance of digital assets in almost every organization. Managing these assets can present quite a challenge. This Executive Report by Andy Maher and Ken Orr will help you figure out what you have, what you should do with it, and how to keep track of it.

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Transparency: Social and Digital Technologies for Building Trust (Vol. 4, No. 10)

Stakeholders of organizations and institutions are demanding more disclosure of information from companies regarding matters that affect their interest. An increasingly transparent society is bringing about major changes in business at the operational, tactical, and strategic levels. This Executive Report by Verna Allee outlines how transparency is changing business models and strategy, fostering new employee behaviors, and overhauling assumptions about enterprise architecture and data management.

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Optimizing BI: Getting the Most for Your Money (Vol. 4, No. 9)

As enterprise BI solutions grow in both importance and capability, it is becoming ever more critical that these deployments be efficient in implementation, effective in operation, and conservative in cost. This Executive Report by Brian J. Dooley examines how these objectives can be achieved, providing guidelines for BI tool and infrastructure analysis and discussing how to achieve a cost-effective result. Cases are provided to highlight the costs and benefits derived from different kinds of BI solutions.

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The Business Without Intelligence: No Metadata, No Results (Vol. 4, No. 8)

The effectiveness of an organization's business intelligence (BI) environment is only as good as the metadata surrounding it. This Executive Report by Adrienne Tannenbaum highlights the importance of metadata as well as how an organization can best utilize metadata to achieve its BI objectives.

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The Case for Digital Identity Management (Vol. 4, No. 7)

Today's IT environment has brought us the extension of the enterprise outside company walls, an explosion in technological complexity, more government regulation, and increased competition. These factors in turn have boosted the significance of digital identity management. This Executive Report by Stowe Boyd helps you understand what digital identity management is, examine its trends, and search for potential solutions to the problems associated with digital identity.

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High Payoffs Drive Growth in Wireless CRM (Vol. 4, No. 6)

Overall corporate IT spending may be growing in mere baby steps, but all signs point to one conclusion about the growth in wireless customer relationship management (CRM) solutions: big strides. This Executive Report by Brenda Lewis highlights outstanding returns and market advantages that four enterprises are experiencing from four different vendors, and offers advice on how wireless CRM can help your organization.

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A Comprehensive Approach to Managing BI/BPM Implementation Costs (Vol. 4, No. 5)

As corporations around the world face more rigorous accountability requirements and a much higher standard in the use of enterprise-wide information, the need for business intelligence (BI) and business process management (BPM) solutions is clear. This Executive Report by Greg Mancuso and Al Moreno offers a comprehensive cost methodology for implementing BI and BPM projects, which require careful planning and monitoring.

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The Art -- and Pursuit -- of Enterprise Search (Vol. 4, No. 4)

Organizations are generating and using increasing amounts of unstructured data from word processing documents, presentations, the Web, and other sources. Deploying enterprise search capabilities is the first step toward integrating disparate information stores of unstructured data. From key elements to best practices, this Executive Report by Dan Sullivan reviews several aspects of enterprise search capabilities.

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The Business-Accessible Data Warehouse (Vol. 4, No. 3)

It's high time for a new approach to data warehousing, one in which business initiatives, rather than IT initiatives, drive data warehouse development. This Executive Report by Michael Schmitz introduces a new data warehouse architecture that focuses on business accessibility to data and utilizes a more flexible data architecture.

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Meeting Today's Data Management Challenges (Vol. 4, No. 2)

In today's environment, managers constantly must do more with less and demonstrate results faster. Despite long-held misconceptions that data management (DM) doesn't directly support an organization's mission, DM has played a central role in supporting organizational technology for some time. This Executive Report by Dr. Peter H. Aiken discusses how organizations are trying to meet today's challenges of "more, better, faster" with their DM practices.

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Finding the Value in Metadata Management (Vol. 4, No. 1)

An enterprise data warehouse is only as effective as its accessibility and understandability. In this Executive Report by Dr. Ken Collier, learn how metadata management practices and technologies can increase the usefulness of business intelligence in your organization.

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2003 | Volume 3
Social Tools: Ready for the Enterprise? (Vol. 3, No. 12)

We know quite a bit about blogs, online communities, and other collaboration technologies that help bring people closer together. Can such tools be used to make business more effective? This Executive Report by Stowe Boyd will help management understand what these "social tools" are and how they can be applied for maximum benefit in the enterprise.

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Data Quality Is Not Optional (Vol. 3, No. 11)

The intelligent enterprise must be able to react swiftly to new business drivers. To make the swift reactions possible, real-time data warehouses and closed-loop business intelligence solutions are quickly becoming the backbone for business activity monitoring and business performance measuring. Having good-quality data is a prerequisite for those activities. In this Executive Report by Larissa Moss, we'll illustrate how we become mired in data chaos, how to cleanse the data, and how to implement continuous improvement practices in data quality that enables you to react swiftly.

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Finding the Hidden Value (and Avoiding the Danger) in E-Mail (Vol. 3, No. 10)

There is much to be said about the value -- not to mention the dangers -- of e-mail. Though much of the IT world focuses on the problems with spam and viruses, corporations should view e-mail as a mode of legal protection yet also ensure that it doesn't get them into legal trouble. In addition, there are significant economic benefits buried in e-mail communications that an organization can gain by choosing the correct strategic path to integrate new policy-compliant e-mail systems and BI tools. This Executive Report by Arun Majumdar focuses on the core business intelligence value of e-mail and how you can harness that value for the good of the organization.

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Web Content Management: The Race to Repurpose (Vol. 3, No. 9)

Rare is the company that does not use a business-to-consumer Web site to attract customers. The different aspects of Web content management systems (WCMSs) help end users push marketing content to potential customers visiting the Web site while also enabling executives to pull data from the site to gauge the impact of disseminated content. The result of this push-pull dynamic is the kind of high-grade business intelligence that separates Web-savvy leaders from the rest of the pack. This Executive Report by John Harney takes a look at the various vendors in the WCMS space and analyzes their products' capabilities.

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Outsourcing Your Business Intelligence: Maximize Impact and Minimize Investment (Vol. 3, No. 8)

Outsourcing business intelligence functions has the potential to offer great benefits to organizations with BI efforts that have not yet matured. This Executive Report by Dr. Ken Collier explores the feasibility and practicality of outsourcing your BI; the scope of a BI outsourcing approach; the cultural, procedural, and technical implications of outsourcing; and what to expect should you take this approach. The goal is to provide guidance and direction for enterprises that are considering whether to outsource part or all of their BI functions.

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Data Modeling and Migration Issues for Customer Relationship Management (Vol. 3, No. 7)

Today, the term "customer relationship management," or CRM, comes with much hype as companies strive to get closer to the people and entities that provide the revenue. But in the course of reaching "CRM nirvana," relevant but difficult-to-exploit information is buried in legacy databases, populating data models designed for operational, but not strategic, use. This Executive Report by David Loshin describes some CRM modeling basics to help you understand how interactions with all people, groups, and organizations can be effectively modeled and managed to properly support your CRM strategy.

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Reaping the Benefits of the Enterprise Portal (Vol. 3, No. 6)

As the Web browser increasingly becomes the central point for information access, enterprise portals are emerging as complete integrated systems. To bring the enterprise portal into your organization, you need to develop an adequate ROI analysis to create the business case and secure corporate support. This Executive Report by Brian J. Dooley shows you how to build that case.

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The Seven Frames of Marketing Intelligence (Vol. 3, No. 5)

To enhance business growth, IT organizations need to know how best to assist their companies' customer support operations. In this Executive Report, author Raymond Pettit outlines the seven frames of marketing intelligence, which can help promote the alignment of technology, business processes, and customer measurement. Pettit offers the current state of marketing science and illustrates how enabling technology and innovative approaches can lead your organization to new solutions.

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Boosting Company Performance Through Business Measures (Vol. 3, No. 4)

Measurements help a business to see how it performs relative to its goals, and IT organizations play a critical role in establishing a measurement program. This Executive Report by Jeffrey McMillan will provide senior technologists and business managers with an understanding of how to implement such a program successfully. The report guides you through a series of steps that ultimately result in the creation of a measurement system that focuses on continuous improvement.

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Collaboration: Multipurpose Products for Team Productivity (Vol. 3, No. 3)

Thanks to the Internet, the collaboration products market has opened the door to a wide host of players pushing power applications. As a result, knowledge infrastructure players such as Lotus, which had long ago staked out its presence in the collaboration space, have been eased to the fringe by better focused point products. This Executive Report looks at products from eight vendors -- and includes case studies -- in three somewhat overlapping categories: team communication, document lifecycle management, and project management.

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Integrating Enterprise Data Architecture and Enterprise Data Warehousing (Vol. 3, No. 2)

Businesses worldwide are moving toward becoming real-time enterprises. In the interests of reaching that goal, they're showing widening interest in the intersection of high-level enterprise data architecture activities with those of data warehousing and strategic IT planning. This Executive Report by Ken Orr examines how the major efforts of strategic IT planning, enterprise architecture, and data integration and access relate to one another, as well as the critical role that the enterprise data architecture plays in this.

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Enterprise Business Suites (Vol. 3, No. 1)

Enterprise business suites promise companies cost savings and improved productivity. With the variety of product suite offerings, how do companies differentiate between products to make smart IT investments? Author John Harney writes, "To differentiate enterprise suites, customers can use several criteria -- partners, pedigree, platform, and progress." This Executive Report presents an overview of business suites, offers a framework for companies to evaluate such products, and includes case studies of companies using various enterprise tools.

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2002 | Volume 2
Building a Smarter Internet: Technologies for the Semantic Web (Vol. 2, No. 12)

"All organizations are drowning in too much information. Semantic technologies are the best bet to develop smarter systems and interfaces. The downside is that very few organizations have extensive experiences using advanced semantics-based artificial intelligence tools for dealing with ontological information," writes Cutter Business Technology Council Fellow and author Ken Orr. In this Executive Report, Orr looks at the Internet as it is today and examines its current challenges and future possibilities. He presents an overview of existing intelligent tools and provides IT executives with a plan to develop smarter systems. Is your organization preparing to take full advantage of these sophisticated technologies?

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The Other Side of Customer Experience Management: Customer-Centric Understanding and Equity (Vol. 2, No. 11)

"What really drives solutions that can optimize customer interactions and experiences, while also measuring, tracking, and linking customers' feelings, attitudes, behaviors, and financial value to the company?" asks author Dr. Raymond Pettit. In this Executive Report, find out how your company can improve business health, growth, and profits with a rich program of integrated customer-centered measurement; explore the "other side of customer experience management."

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Integration Capabilities of Enterprise Portals (Vol. 2, No. 10)

It is imperative for companies to understand the strengths, limitations, and implications of enterprise portals. According to author Brian J. Dooley, enterprise portals "make the enterprise more efficient, make information more effective, and make the enterprise more competitive." This Executive Report provides an overview of current issues and serves as a guide for companies to successfully plan and implement an enterprise portal integration strategy.

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Personalization from Web Sites to Software: Mass-Produced Individuality (Vol. 2, No. 9)

"Personalization is a pervasive aspect of today's computing" writes author Jesse Feiler. Explore how personalization can be leveraged to benefit your organization. In this Executive Report, Feiler covers the following critical issues:

  • What organizations can personalize
  • Purposes/benefits of personalization
  • Personalization tools
  • What your organization needs to do in order to personalize
  • Personalization data
  • Risks in personalization
  • Interactive personalization
  • The future of human/computer interaction

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Developing BI Decision-Support Applications: Not Business As Usual (Vol. 2, No. 8)

According to Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Larissa Moss, "Most organizations are sitting on top of a gold mine, the gold being all the data collected about their customers; it would be a waste not to mine this hidden BI treasure." Find out how to properly manage BI projects in this Executive Report. Moss states, "BI projects must deal with new tasks, new technologies, new tools, new database designs, and new integration requirements. Since these new challenges are not adequately addressed by any current development methods, BI projects need new development guidelines." Here, Moss presents these guidelines and offers expert advice.

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Supply Chain Intelligence: Technology, Applications, and Products (Vol. 2, No. 7)

This Executive Report by Curt Hall provides an overview of Supply Chain Intelligence (SCI) and the technological requirements for its implementation. It also provides an overview of the market for SCI products, and discusses key products for implementing SCI applications. According to Hall, "The bottom line is that SCI requires the application of data warehousing and BI techniques on a strategic, enterprise scale to enable the integration of multiple data sources, tailored analytics, key performance indicators (KPIs), industry best practices, business processes, and various operational (transaction-processing) systems."

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Managing Corporate Intellectual Property: Key to the Knowledge-to-Net-Worth Transformation (Vol. 2, No. 6)

This report, by the KMIP Task Force with special credits to Bob Shearer & Bruce Taylor, provides insight into intangible asset management (particularly those intangibles relating to corporate knowledge and intellectual property) on the competitive enterprise and America's capital markets. The authors of the report sections represent partner organizations participating in the National Knowledge & Intellectual Property Taskforce.

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The 12 Application Priorities for Competitive Intelligence in the Modern Business Enterprise (Vol. 2, No. 5)

This Executive Report by Arik Johnson explains competitive intelligence and illustrates how true business value can be realized with an entrepreneurial approach to a CI program. Following an overview of the evolution of competitive intelligence, the report outlines 12 application priorities in order to move forward with a CI program. Writes Johnson, "Ultimately, CI is still about understanding (before it happens) what is likely to happen, predicting such outcomes with a reliable degree of accuracy, and then devising a predefined response or countervailing strategy to minimize the impact of such events on the firm's ability to operate in its markets today and expand into the markets of tomorrow."

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Achieving a High-Quality Data Resource (Vol. 2, No. 4)

This Executive Report by Michael Brackett focuses on what has been learned to date about stopping data disparity and setting the stage to resolve the existing disparity. Writes Brackett, "Today, the data resource in most public and private sector organizations is in a state of disarray. There are rapidly increasing quantities of disparate data that cannot be readily integrated to meet the demand for information to support dynamic business activities. Most organizations are routinely, methodically, systematically, and consistently ruining the quality of their data resource." Learn how your organization can develop a data resource quality improvement initiative using the concepts, principles, techniques, and good practices described in this report.

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The State of CRM: Addressing Deficiencies and the Achilles' Heel of CRM (Vol. 2, No. 3)

How can organizations optimize their CRM strategy? How can CRM seriously achieve competitive advantage? In this Executive Report, author, Raymond Pettit, examines CRM strategies and investments to date and points out the deficiencies or "choke points" that prevent companies from realizing the full of value of their CRM initiatives. In addition, he proposes an approach that involves, "a thorough strategy development process that takes into account numerous variables in order to optimize the fit between organizational and customer needs." Here, Pettit details the various efforts that have arisen to address the deficiencies of CRM, in order to maximize a company's CRM solution.

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Improving Customer Relationships Using Wireless Technology (Vol. 2, No. 2)

Writes author Ian Hayes, "Wireless technologies excel at distributing information and resources to the areas where they will have the most impact. For CRM purposes, wireless technologies are a natural, and generally low-cost, extension of efforts already under way to improve customer relationships." This report looks at wireless technologies from a customer relationship perspective. Some of these technologies directly affect customer interactions by extending CRM applications and tools to wireless platforms and devices. Others indirectly impact customer happiness by improving business processes to deliver more accurate or timely service. Still others enable the creation of entirely new classes of value-adding products and services, like General Motors' OnStar vehicle program.

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Knowledge Management: The Major Enabler of Enterprise Performance (Vol. 2, No. 1)

"Knowledge is the fundamental enabler of performance," writes author Karl Wiig. "Consequently, a major task for any enterprise is to make certain that tacit and structural knowledge -- intellectual capital -- is leveraged to improve effectiveness and then recycled to be used again by others. All activities undertaken to achieve this goal constitute knowledge management (KM)." This report outlines the ways in which the effective enterprise pursues explicit and systematic KM to maximize the quality, readiness, and use of knowledge to tackle challenges and render services that could not be delivered in the past.

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2002 | Volume 1
Business Rules (Vol. 1, No. 8)

"A business rules system," says author David Loshin, "is designed to capture the knowledge of all the assertions, constraints, guidelines, policies, and regulations that drive a business process and to manage that knowledge as a corporate asset." This report investigates the ideas behind rule-based systems, providing an introduction to business and data quality rules, as well as a look at the ways in which rule-based systems make use of these rules. It examines some of the "insides" of a rules engine, as well as some criteria for evaluating rule-based systems. The report explores the concepts revolving around business rules, business rules systems, the benefits that a business rules system can provide, as well as the issues that can block the success of a business rules project.

Organizational and Cultural Barriers to Business Intelligence (Vol. 1, No. 7)

"Every BI application has two major components: functionality and data," writes author Larissa T. Moss. "Although many technology solutions are available to assist with BI functionality, the promise of integrated, consistent, clean, and reconciled data across the entire organization has gone largely unfulfilled." The root causes, Moss argues, are not based in the technology solutions but in organizational and cultural barriers. Any business unit that performs activities that cause another business unit to scrap and rework products should be penalized, while any business unit that corrects old decision support impairments and promotes the new cross-organizational approach should be rewarded.

A Practical Guide to Customer Relationship Management (Vol. 1, No. 6)

"CRM is more than technology," writes author Lisa Loftis. "CRM entails knowing your customers, understanding their relationships (both with you and with others), and managing all interactions with these customers accordingly." This report presents three critical areas of CRM: the ABCs (a comprehensive definition that specifies all key components), the CSFs (critical success factors when transitioning to a customer-focused organization), and the CIF (a corporate information factory for building an integrated customer information environment).

Data Enhancement (Vol. 1, No. 5)

Combining information from multiple databases is not a new idea, but the advances in technology and system speed open up new vistas for applying intelligent techniques. In this report, author David Loshin discusses how using a focused methodology for adding value through the data enhancement and enhancement process, companies can greatly improve the effectiveness of their customer relationship, marketing, and sales programs. Writes Loshin, "Over the next 5-10 years, companies that can develop a knowledge management strategy that incorporates intelligent information merging and data enhancement will benefit from improved customer relationship management, better ability to scale operational processing, and improved straight-through processing capabilities."

Data Quality for E-Business (Vol. 1, No. 4)

Writes author Tom Redman, "Data quality is not a particularly sexy topic. It's not as exciting as the latest Java script, clever application, or terabyte-sized database engine. But no business, and certainly no e-business, can survive, never mind thrive, without high-quality data." This report details the strategies of data-error prevention, along with the 10 habits of organizations that create high-quality data and have synthesized these habits into an overall data quality system.

Combining Business Intelligence with ERP Systems (Vol. 1, No. 3)

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications can do wonders for replacing a variety of legacy and other disparate information systems strung out across the enterprise. The same cannot be said of their decision support, data warehousing, and business intelligence (BI) capabilities. To compensate for this lack, many organizations have turned to building data warehouses and data marts -- separate from their ERP systems -- to handle their business users' data analysis needs. But ERP systems are monolithic environments with complex architectures (consisting of large numbers of tables), proprietary interfaces and programming languages, and nonstandard data storage methods, all of which make data warehousing difficult. This Executive Report, by Curt Hall, outlines the choices organizations have when it comes to building a data warehouse or adding decision support systems capabilities to their ERP applications.

Enterprise Portals (Vol. 1, No. 2)

In this Executive Report, author Clive Finkelstein reviews the concepts, product categories, features, and benefits of enterprise portals, which are defined as a single gateway via a corporate intranet or Internet to relevant workflows, application systems, and databases integrated using the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and tailored to the specific job responsibilities of each individual.

To illustrate the use and application of enterprise portals, the report discusses two enterprise portal case studies. It also introduces the different portal categories and examines a number of portal products that are available in each of these categories. The two case study examples discussed were the winners of Digital Consulting Institute's (DCI) 2001 Annual Portal Excellence Awards: the Herman Miller business-to-business e-business portal and the Ford Motor Company business-to-employee (B2E) internal corporate portal.

Data Warehousing: Supporting Business Intelligence (Vol. 1, No. 1)

In this executive report, author Jonathan Geiger describes the business value that BI capabilities provide, the architecture needed to support the environment, and a sound approach for building and managing it. Writes Geiger, "The most significant generic benefit of the BI environment is the collection -- in the data warehouse -- of the single, consolidated, enterprise view of the data. Although there are technical efficiency benefits, the major beneficiaries of the single store of information are the business users. With this consolidated information as a base, strategic analysts can get to the data they need much easier, use the same figures as the basis of their analysis, and have a common understanding of business terms. A data warehouse built to support customer relationship management, for example, will enable companies to know how many customers they have and the profitability of each customer. Armed with this information, a company can make sound business decisions affecting both customer segments and individual customers."

Business Intelligence: Executive Report Abstracts