Cindy Howson, een blogger bij IntelligentEnterprise.com, heeft onlangs een boek uitgebracht naar aanleiding van een onderzoek onder 500 Business Intelligence professionals. Het boek bevat naast een no-nonsense uitleg voor de gevorderde en beginnende BI professional ook een tiental 'BI secrets'. Hieronder een korte review van collega Doug Henschen evenals een link naar een samenvatting en PDF van een volledig hoofdstuk uit het boek.

Boekbespreking 

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True to its name, Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App is a 244-page guidebook that will help beginners get off on the right foot while guiding veterans toward more successful approaches. The book is geared, as Cindi explains, to "businesspeople who feel their organizations are not making the most optimal decisions," as well as to executive sponsors, BI program/project managers and technical experts who design and implement aspects of the BI solution.

Cindi puts the focus on business results right up front in Chapter 1, in which she explains how BI delivers value and improves performance. She also introduces the case examples of Flight Stats, Corporate Express, Dow Chemical, Norway Post, 1 800-CONTACTS, Continental Airlines and Emergency Medical Associates, seven successful BI practitioners from which she draws proven best practices and instructive anecdotes throughout the book.

You'll find everything from the basics — with chapters on BI tools and components, dataquality and BI department/competency center organization — to more advanced advice — such as advice on ensuring relevant insight, adopting agile development approaches and picking the right tool.

What I like most about this book is that it's all written in Cindi's engaging, no-techno-babble prose, and she ends each topical chapter with helpful "Best Practices for Successful Business Intelligence," drawn from her research and the experience of successful practitioners.

In the spirit of the season, I'll share an abbreviated version of Cindi's Top-Ten Secrets to Successful BI:

1. Measure success in multiple ways…
2. Understand the effect of Luck, Opportunity, Frustration and Threat…
3. Garner executive support…
4. Start with a solid data foundation…
5. Align the BI strategy with the goals of the business…
6. Find the relevance of BI for every worker…
7. Use agile development practices…
8. Organize BI teams and experts for success…
9. Choose appropriate BI tools…
10. Foster fact-based decision making, present data visually and promote BI successes…

Bron: IntelligentEnterprise.com

Hoofdstuk 3: The BI Front-End 

SearchDatamanagement.com heeft een samenvatting van dit hoofdstuk gepubliceerd. De volledige PDF is ook te downloaden.