Health care is top of mind for many people in the U.S., often from the perspective of what needs to change in the industry. Technology, especially decision-making technology, can play a huge role. Four areas of the health care market seem to be ripe for decision management to make a difference.

New entrants into the BPM market, newly merged vendors and major new releases have changed the playing field quite a bit. In light of these factors, I thought it would be of value to review the key steps to get started with your performance management product search.

To make a truly sound decision, buyers must know how software will impact their company.

A subtype inherits its primary key from its supertype. If the supertype is Party, for example, we copy the Party ID down into the primary keys of the subtypes Person and Organization.

Without a DGS, your organization is clearly in trouble. You may have addressed one or two of the components of a DGS, but without the components that are the most important to your organization, you will waste money

After all the investments in business intelligence (BI) over the years, many companies are still data rich but information poor. While IT bragged about its multiterabyte data warehouse, the businesspeople were using Microsoft Excel like duct tape to patch together the information they needed.

Successful data quality management is a process of aligning your areas of focus for data quality enhancements with the strategic and tactical goals of your business end users.

Product information management is all about context, says Silver Creek Systems President and CEO Barbara Mowry.

It’s another election year in the U.S., and news of the races, the candidates, the issues - politics blow by blow - cannot be avoided. Everywhere you turn, there’s talk of competing interests, and the desire for power and leadership is plain on every candidate’s face. For others, though, the mere mention of politics can cause blood pressure to rise; these people would as soon avoid discussion of or involvement in any politically charged situation.

How the master data is stored, accessed and propagated to the enterprise indicates master data management’s (MDM’s) evolution in an enterprise. The five stages of MDM maturity can help you gauge your company’s MDM evolution and offer a structured, deliberate pathway forward.

Although performance management and master data management are often treated as two distinct disciplines with their own methodologies, tools and implementations, in reality, they are two dimensions of an enterprise information management strategy.

This trends in data warehousing and business intelligence article takes the approach to prediction often used at enterprises with innovation agendas: stand in the future and look back toward the present, and then say what commitments are needed to create such a future.

A master data management initiative has the potential to be the most politically charged project your organization has seen in quite a while. Start by understanding the landscape and having a plan to make your MDM strategy successful.

The data locked in your corporate systems has a story to tell. Often, it’s a sad story of neglect and misuse that could be costing your company millions of dollars. Sometimes, though, data has secrets to tell - secrets that could make you millions.

I’ve been working recently with a small financial institution that has a significant need for analysis capabilities but does not have the budget for a lengthy project or expensive technology.

As human beings, we intuitively understand the importance of events. But in an IT environment, understanding business events and analyzing what actions should be taken as a result of a certain series of events are new developments. The logical pathways that lead an application to interpret meaning are still being formed, and the understanding of how certain activities should ensue is growing. …

UMB has implemented an enterprise customer relationship management (CRM) solution with a strategic focus on data quality best practices.

One of the most frequent and difficult questions I have received lately is, “How do I measure the success of my loyalty program?” As organizations solidify relationship marketing strategies and technology support, loyalty has resurfaced as a valid objective but continues to be elusive to obtain. The question is not how to get started, but of all the possible metrics and definitions of loyalty, which is the correct one for me? I pondered these difficult questions during the holiday season, and I realized the similarities between my son’s attention to his new holiday presents and my clients’ questions regarding loyalty measurement.

The Exeros software accelerates the mapping process and reduces project risk by automating the discovery of business rules, complex transformations and data exceptions both within and between data sources. For example, one project that we expected to take 540 data analyst hours over six months took only 54 analyst hours over two and a half weeks.

Harte-Hanks Company, entitled “Operational BI: Getting Real-Time About Performance,” best-in-class

The roads to BI include data warehousing, enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), master data management (MDM), data quality, data mining, metadata management and operational BI. These are all inculcated into the CIO’s culture as projects requiring dedicated and significant budgets and widespread corporate interest.

Due to increased competition, government regulations and corporate consolidation within the life sciences industry, Shire wanted to optimize the use of customer and customer-related information such as product, contract and organization data, which will ultimately provide the company’s lines of business with a critical and accurate 360-degree view of customers.

As AFBA’s business has evolved into providing insurance, banking and investment services, so too has the number of information systems across the enterprise. Employees had to seek out answers from multiple systems, which was an enormous strain on productivity and efficiency.

Definitions of items of data really matter, but there are a couple of ways to see the value in them. One is when we focus on an individual definition within the context of a project. From such a siloed perspective, there can be a temptation to simply accept whatever is “good enough,” especially if the project team has a good idea of what the data means and is not held up due to a lack of data definitions.

Data has become the lifeblood of running a business. Whether using a balanced scorecard or an operational dashboard as the primary tool to review performance measures, most organizations today devote significant time and resources to ensuring the quality and availability of data. Comparatively little attention is paid to building managers’ capability to analyze data and turn it into decisions, which is the primary goal of performance measurement.

Your design goal is ease of use, not elegance. In the final step of building dimensional models that are intended for consumption by end users, we should be willing to stand on our heads to make our BI systems understandable and fast. That often means transferring work into the extract, transform and load back room and tolerating more storage overhead in order to simplify the final data presentation.

Life Time Fitness has redefined and expanded traditional approaches to the health club industry with individualized services (personal trainers, swim instructors), nutritional products, health solutions, a health-fitness magazine and athletic events sponsorship.

PLATFORMS: Two Composite servers running Windows Server 2003, multiple SQL Server databases running SQL 2000 and SQL 2005, and a Siebel application. …

Neopost is the fastest-growing worldwide provider of mailing and shipping solutions. Neopost partners with its customers to help them achieve higher levels of efficiency, control and value in their mailing operation.

Your design goal is ease of use, not elegance. In the final step of building dimensional models that are intended for consumption by end users, we should be willing to stand on our heads to make our BI systems understandable and fast. That often means transferring work into the extract, transform and load back room and tolerating more storage overhead in order to simplify the final data presentation.

Definitions of items of data really matter, but there are a couple of ways to see the value in them. One is when we focus on an individual definition within the context of a project. From such a siloed perspective, there can be a temptation to simply accept whatever is “good enough,” especially if the project team has a good idea of what the data means and is not held up due to a lack of data definitions.

Data has become the lifeblood of running a business. Whether using a balanced scorecard or an operational dashboard as the primary tool to review performance measures, most organizations today devote significant time and resources to ensuring the quality and availability of data. Comparatively little attention is paid to building managers’ capability to analyze data and turn it into decisions, which is the primary goal of performance measurement.

I’ve been working recently with a small financial institution that has a significant need for analysis capabilities but does not have the budget for a lengthy project or expensive technology.

The data locked in your corporate systems has a story to tell. Often, it’s a sad story of neglect and misuse that could be costing your company millions of dollars. Sometimes, though, data has secrets to tell - secrets that could make you millions.

A subtype inherits its primary key from its supertype. If the supertype is Party, for example, we copy the Party ID down into the primary keys of the subtypes Person and Organization.

Without a DGS, your organization is clearly in trouble. You may have addressed one or two of the components of a DGS, but without the components that are the most important to your organization, you will waste money

To make a truly sound decision, buyers must know how software will impact their company.

New entrants into the BPM market, newly merged vendors and major new releases have changed the playing field quite a bit. In light of these factors, I thought it would be of value to review the key steps to get started with your performance management product search.

Across the oil and gas industry, initial investments have been made to formalize work processes and capture information and data within parts of the enterprise. However, there is business opportunity as well as competitive necessity to further standardize work processes throughout enterprises and integrate information with the work process. Leading companies are now grasping the potential of taking the right steps to do this.

Health care is top of mind for many people in the U.S., often from the perspective of what needs to change in the industry. Technology, especially decision-making technology, can play a huge role. Four areas of the health care market seem to be ripe for decision management to make a difference.

After all the investments in business intelligence (BI) over the years, many companies are still data rich but information poor. While IT bragged about its multiterabyte data warehouse, the businesspeople were using Microsoft Excel like duct tape to patch together the information they needed.

Successful data quality management is a process of aligning your areas of focus for data quality enhancements with the strategic and tactical goals of your business end users.

It’s another election year in the U.S., and news of the races, the candidates, the issues - politics blow by blow - cannot be avoided. Everywhere you turn, there’s talk of competing interests, and the desire for power and leadership is plain on every candidate’s face. For others, though, the mere mention of politics can cause blood pressure to rise; these people would as soon avoid discussion of or involvement in any politically charged situation.

Product information management is all about context, says Silver Creek Systems President and CEO Barbara Mowry.

This trends in data warehousing and business intelligence article takes the approach to prediction often used at enterprises with innovation agendas: stand in the future and look back toward the present, and then say what commitments are needed to create such a future.

A master data management initiative has the potential to be the most politically charged project your organization has seen in quite a while. Start by understanding the landscape and having a plan to make your MDM strategy successful.

Although performance management and master data management are often treated as two distinct disciplines with their own methodologies, tools and implementations, in reality, they are two dimensions of an enterprise information management strategy.

How the master data is stored, accessed and propagated to the enterprise indicates master data management’s (MDM’s) evolution in an enterprise. The five stages of MDM maturity can help you gauge your company’s MDM evolution and offer a structured, deliberate pathway forward.

Harte-Hanks Company, entitled “Operational BI: Getting Real-Time About Performance,” best-in-class

The roads to BI include data warehousing, enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), master data management (MDM), data quality, data mining, metadata management and operational BI. These are all inculcated into the CIO’s culture as projects requiring dedicated and significant budgets and widespread corporate interest.

The Exeros software accelerates the mapping process and reduces project risk by automating the discovery of business rules, complex transformations and data exceptions both within and between data sources. For example, one project that we expected to take 540 data analyst hours over six months took only 54 analyst hours over two and a half weeks.

One of the most frequent and difficult questions I have received lately is, “How do I measure the success of my loyalty program?” As organizations solidify relationship marketing strategies and technology support, loyalty has resurfaced as a valid objective but continues to be elusive to obtain. The question is not how to get started, but of all the possible metrics and definitions of loyalty, which is the correct one for me? I pondered these difficult questions during the holiday season, and I realized the similarities between my son’s attention to his new holiday presents and my clients’ questions regarding loyalty measurement.

As human beings, we intuitively understand the importance of events. But in an IT environment, understanding business events and analyzing what actions should be taken as a result of a certain series of events are new developments. The logical pathways that lead an application to interpret meaning are still being formed, and the understanding of how certain activities should ensue is growing. …

UMB has implemented an enterprise customer relationship management (CRM) solution with a strategic focus on data quality best practices.

Due to increased competition, government regulations and corporate consolidation within the life sciences industry, Shire wanted to optimize the use of customer and customer-related information such as product, contract and organization data, which will ultimately provide the company’s lines of business with a critical and accurate 360-degree view of customers.

As AFBA’s business has evolved into providing insurance, banking and investment services, so too has the number of information systems across the enterprise. Employees had to seek out answers from multiple systems, which was an enormous strain on productivity and efficiency.

Neopost is the fastest-growing worldwide provider of mailing and shipping solutions. Neopost partners with its customers to help them achieve higher levels of efficiency, control and value in their mailing operation.

Life Time Fitness has redefined and expanded traditional approaches to the health club industry with individualized services (personal trainers, swim instructors), nutritional products, health solutions, a health-fitness magazine and athletic events sponsorship.

PLATFORMS: Two Composite servers running Windows Server 2003, multiple SQL Server databases running SQL 2000 and SQL 2005, and a Siebel application. …