If you are looking for a book that describes the process of implementing a Business Intelligence project, authors Larissa Moss and Shaku Atre have done an excellent job. Their book Business Intelligence Roadmap: The Complete Project Lifecycle for Decision-Support Applications describes a ground plan for BI from a vendor neutral perspective. With the number of BI offerings that are available, each touting their own style, it’s refreshing to finally get an outlook that focuses on managing the project over selling specific features. This book certainly fills that void. [More…]

January 31, 2008. The IBM purchase of Cognos is complete. Following the SAP purchase of Business Object, and the Oracle purchase of Hyperion and now BEA, finalizing the purchase of Cognos must be a relief to IBM. The deal had been in the works for months, and with the approval of Cognos shareholders has now come to pass. [More…]

Business Intelligence encompasses a range of techniques to collect, integrate, analyze, and present information about business operations. Business Intelligence tools draw upon historical data contained in a relational database, Data Warehouse. or Data Mart. Current information is compared with historical data as well as predictions from models to generate reports that help decision makers evaluate performance. Data Visualization techniques combined with Data Mining tools may be applied to financial, production, and sales data to identify trends through the use of statistical analysis and machine learning techniques. [More…]