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Cindi Howson's BI Scorecard
Cindi Howson is the founder of BIScorecard, a Web site for in-depth BI product reviews. She has been using, implementing and evaluating business intelligence tools for more than 15 years. She is the author of Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App and Business Objects XI R2: The Complete Reference. She teaches for The Datawarehousing Institute (TDWI) and is a frequent speaker at industry events. See More by Cindi Howson The 'Googlization' of BI... 7 Feet of Snow Coming!
One thing is clear: When you have four Intelligent Enterprise bloggers blogging on a similar topic, it's important! My fear though, in looking at Web site logs, is that we're not yet grabbing your attention on just how important this topic is. "Search and BI" sounds boring. "Structured and unstructured content" is too conceptual to get you excited. Will the "Googlization of BI" grab your attention? "Seven feet of snow coming your way!"? (Okay, NJ is getting only a puny 12 inches, just enough to make me dread flying tomorrow.) As I write in a new BIScorecard report on BI/search integration, I suspect that the Googlization of BI will have as profound an impact on BI as the iPod has had on the music industry. This whole integration is still emerging. As editor Doug Henschen points out, customer references are hard to come by. This is not surprising to me as vendors only recently began shipping solutions, and there is still much industry education that needs to happen. Read Seth Grimes blog, though, and you know the problem too well: your company built a data warehouse and has hundreds, even thousands of reports, but even sophisticated users can't find what they need. Search-enabled BI goes a long way to solving this issue. The other big issue that Search-enabled BI can solve is engaging casual users. This is the part of putting a simple interface, like Google, in a manager's hands to enter a phrase "Open Orders Oswego, NY" to have a query built on the fly that tells the manager exactly how much of a mess the snow there will create on the rest of the supply chain. No more overwhelming interface, days of training or long lists of columns and tables! Even though vendor solutions are still emerging, you as the BI customer need to start preparing now in a number of ways. The most valuable step you can take today is to clean up your business meta data, providing end users with meaningful descriptions and explanations of metrics and columns in the data warehouse. Fail to do this, and you make the value of Search-enabled BI tools less effective.  E-MAIL | SLASHDOT | DIGG This is a public forum. CMP Technology and its affiliates are not responsible for and do not control what is posted herein. CMP Technology makes no warranties or guarantees concerning any advice dispensed by its staff members or readers. Community standards in this comment area do not permit hate language, excessive profanity, or other patently offensive language. Please be aware that all information posted to this comment area becomes the property of CMP Media LLC and may be edited and republished in print or electronic format as outlined in CMP Technology's Terms of Service. Important Note: This comment area is NOT intended for commercial messages or solicitations of business.
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Cindi Howson on Business Intelligence The Brain Food Blogger Tony Byrne on Content Management SQL Puzzlers by Joe Celko Rajan Chandras on IT & Information Management Seth Grimes on Analytics In Context by Doug Henschen Phil Kemelor on Web Analytics Sandy Kemsley's Column Two Nelson King on Enterprise App Development David Linthicum on Software as a Service Natural Insight, By Mark Madsen Alan Pelz-Sharpe on Content Management Mark Smith on Performance Management Neil Raden on Business Intelligence Bruce Silver on Business Process Management Product Maven  Subscribe to RSS Archives
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