White Papers and Research

How Data Warehousing Challenges Can Be Resolved Through Modelling

Data warehouse solutions are viewed differently today. The emphasis is less on the technological problems, and more on the day-to-day issues of living and working with a data warehouse. Issues include: • Configuration/Change Management • Managing and Improving Data Quality • Engagement with the Enterprise Architecture • Enhancing Return on Investment

David M. Walker, data warehouse industry expert identifies the challenges that are affecting today’s data warehouse environment and how modeling can address those challenges.

Sybase® IQ: The Economics of

The demand for business intelligence is growing. Decision-makers need better access to information to make smarter, faster decisions in response to changing circumstances. Reporting is one form of business intelligence that has become business-critical.

Selecting a Visual Analytics Application

Visual analytics is becoming the fastest way for people to explore and understand data of any size. Read our guide for selecting a visual analytics, or data visualization, software application. Based on the 7 defining characteristics of visual analytics, this white paper will tell you exactly what to look for and how to evaluate applications. You’ll learn exactly the questions to ask application vendors about their visual analytics capabilities.

Gaining the Performance Edge Using a Column-Oriented Database Management System

As organizations continue to employ larger data warehouses, the need for performance will continue to outpace the capabilities of traditional relational databases. This paper explores the data explosion and why column-oriented database systems are able to provide the boost needed to gain the performance edge.

Forrester Report: Best Practices for Scaling the Next-Generation Enterprise Data Warehouse

Data warehousing professionals continue to expand the scale, scope, and deployment roles for their enterprise data warehouse investments. Today’s most demanding EDW environments support petabytes of aggregated data, trillions of records, thousands of concurrent users and queries, complex mixed-query workloads, subsecond latencies, and continuous high volume data loading. Information managers are adopting EDW best practices that push the scalability and performance envelope without sacrificing the agility to optimize this critical infrastructure to ever-changing analytic workloads.

Reaping the Benefits of Next Generation Dashboards

Traditional BI solutions face many obstacles and limitations. However, the need for timely and succinct business intelligence (BI) continues to grow. As a result, BI has continued to evolve - creating a next generation of BI. This white paper explores how organizations are demanding more integrated and flexible business intelligence solutions that facilitate more timely and informed decisions, as well as how next generation of dashboards solve these challenges.

Overall Approach to Data Quality ROI

Data quality is an elusive subject that can defy measurement and yet be critical enough to derail any single IT project, strategic initiative, or even a company as a whole. Authored by William McKnight, this white paper outlines six key steps that organizations can put into process to help realize tangible ROI on data quality initiatives, ensuring that corporate data assets can be leveraged as a competitive advantage.

Why Midsize Companies Need Business Intelligence Solutions in this uncertain global economy

Learn how midsize companies are putting in place a business intelligence information infrastructure - making them more likely to adhere to their budgets and deadlines, concentrate on improving the overall business rather than just one department, and reward employees accordingly.

Enterprise Information Management: Strategy, Best Practices & Technologies on Your Path to Success

Authored by Frank Dravis, Baseline Consulting, this paper discusses: (1) EIM strategy development and (2) enabling information management technology. Understanding these two areas is crucial to starting, planning and executing an EIM initiative. And while there are other important technology concepts in EIM—such as data warehousing and data security—only a corporate-wide data management vision can bind disparate, heterogeneous data sources together in a framework for access and sharing of data. As such, the paper also discusses metadata management, master data management, data quality, and data migration—all of which play important roles in integrating and managing data.

Business Intelligence for the Small to Medium Sized Business

As information flows more freely in the business world, decisions need to be made quicker and based on sturdier data. The analytical capability that was once reserved for large enterprises has now permeated the world of Small to Medium Businesses (SMBs) and provided a solid foundation of visibility into what really matters to these companies. Aberdeen's research shows a marked uptake in the use of Business Intelligence (BI) solutions in the SMB market over the past year. Based on feedback from almost 650 end-user organizations, this report serves as a roadmap for SMBs looking to improve their analytical capability and achieve Best-in-Class performance through the deployment of BI.

7 Ways to Reduce IT Costs with Master Data Management

Faced with budget cuts In today's economic environment, how can IT maintain service levels and continue to provide value to business? Smart IT decision-makers are investing in master data management

Data Management for Business Intelligence

As the sheer amount of information available for business intelligence applications has grown, and the sophistication of BI capabilities has accelerated, organizations are striving to improve time-to-information for business users. Data storage and retrieval decisions have started to be made based on cost rather than fulfilling a business need, and this has led to compromises that impact business performance. In January and February of 2008, Aberdeen Group conducted a research program among 333 respondents from several industry sectors, geographies, company sizes and job roles. The program included an online survey and several one-on-one interviews.

Using Master Data in Business Intelligence

Improve planning, building and deploying a master data management environment. Consider an evolutionary – rather than revolutionary – approach to MDM, and examine how to use MDM with business intelligence applications and an underlying data warehousing environment to improve decision-making.

How Banks Can Enhance Online Customer Relationships

Banks have traditionally organized their customer service efforts by product or channel, which places the burden of navigating the bank’s various organizations on their customers, leaving them confused and frustrated. As more institutions move to simplify and integrate their channel services using online customer portals, banks must make organizational and technological changes to attract and retain their customers.

Open Source Paves the Way for the Next Generation of Enterprise IT

In October 2008, Bull commissioned Forrester Consulting to evaluate the upcoming paradigm change of open source software enterprise adoption. In conducting in-depth interviews with 132 senior business and IT executives from large companies that are using open source products, Forrester found that these companies are embracing a fundamentally different understanding of software.