Back to newsletter listFrom the TDWI Research Desk
Wayne Eckerson, TDWI Director of Research and Services
Benchmark Your BI Maturity
It's a sign of our maturity as an industry that executives now frequently ask for industry benchmarks so that they can compare their BI programs to those at other organizations. The motivation is clear: executives want to know whether their rate of spending, the size of their team, and their expenditures for hardware, software, and services are in line with industry averages-or better yet, direct competitors.
Until now, there's been no easy way to perform such a benchmark. If your boss is really intent on numbers, perhaps you found a way to collaborate with your peers at competitive companies to share numbers, or maybe you hired a consultant to perform an independent assessment. Fortunately, TDWI now offers an online benchmarking service that enables you to assess your BI maturity in an objective way and compare your results immediately to hundreds of other organizations by revenues, BI budget, geographic location, and other variables. To participate, go to: www.tdwi.org/benchmark
The service is free (thanks to Business Objects which sponsored the survey) and it takes about 25 minutes to complete the 60 questions. You can print a copy of all the questions and your answers. You can also view an interactive bar chart that assesses your BI maturity in eight categories and compares your results to other organizations that have participated in the service.
Best Practices Research Reports Be the First to See the Upcoming Spreadmart Research Report
—SPECIAL OFFER: Take our research survey and be the first to receive TDWI's upcoming Best Practices Research report, Strategies for Managing Spreadmarts and Integrating with Microsoft Office, when it is published in January 2008.—
One of the biggest painpoints BI professionals face is dealing with "spreadmarts"—renegade spreadsheets and desktop databases that suck up expensive analyst time and undermine data consistency and compliance efforts. The question is, how do you enable users to work in Microsoft Office applications without undermining a single version of truth? Our upcoming report will answer this question and provide several approaches for corralling renegade data shadow systems and explain technical advances for integrating with Microsoft Office applications.
To write this report, we need your help. We'd like to understand the scope and costs of spreadmarts and effective remedies. Please let us know how you are approaching spreadmarts by taking our 15-minute survey at the following Web address: http://info.101com.com/default.aspx?id=42175
TDWI proudly presents this year's technology poster
The Three Threes of Performance Dashboards
TDWI's 2007 Technology Poster, The Three Threes of Performance Dashboards, illustrates how performance dashboards provide a layered interface that conforms to the way users work, helping them move through successive layers of information in a carefully guided and systematic manner. When aligned with strategic objectives and plans, performance dashboards empower users to work more efficiently and effectively toward a common set of goals. They help measure the past, monitor the present, and forecast the future, allowing an organization to adjust its strategy and tactics in real time to optimize performance.
Request your complimentary poster today.
Upcoming Must-See Webinars
9.25.07 Spanning the Gulf: Getting Traction for Your BI Solution If you're having difficulty getting traction for your BI solution, you're probably stuck in the Gulf—a confluence of obstacles and challenges that affect early-stage BI projects. Wayne Eckerson, author of TDWI's BI Maturity Model, will describe the symptoms of the Gulf and provide you with prescriptions for making a clean crossing into a BI environment that delivers tangible business value to more users. Sign up.
9.27.07 Crossing the Chasm: Delivering a Strategic, Enterprise BI Solution Moving from adolescence to adulthood is difficult: you struggle to find a direction, an identity, and recognition of your true potential. The same is true for BI programs—many get stuck in BI adolescence, unable to cross the chasm into adulthood. Learn key challenges facing BI programs, and get tips for creating an agile architecture and organizational structure to help you cross the chasm and deliver high-value strategic solutions. Sign up.
Best Practices Report
Best Practices in Operational BI: Converging Analytical and Operational Processes
Operational business intelligence (BI) represents a turning point in the evolution of BI. Traditionally, BI has been the province of technically savvy business analysts who spend many hours with sophisticated tools analyzing trends and patterns in large volumes of historical data to improve the effectiveness of strategic and tactical decisions. But operational BI changes this equation: it moves BI out of the back room and embeds it into the fabric of the business, intertwining it with operational processes and applications that drive thousands of daily decisions. This report describes the promise of operational BI and provides suggestions about how to surmount the challenges involved in converging operational and analytical processes.
Download your complimentary copy today.
You can also listen to Wayne Eckerson, TDWI's Director of Research, explain the report's highlights in a Webinar.
Best Practices Report
BI Search and Text Analytics: New Additions to the BI Technology Stack
This report details how the expansion of the technology stack for business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing (DW) accommodates two relatively new additions, namely BI search and text analytics. Although each stands ably on its own, the two are related in that they tend to operate on unstructured data. Unstructured data is playing a larger role in BI and DW over time, and that role is today supported largely by tools and techniques for BI search and text analytics.
Download your complimentary copy today.
You can also listen to Philip Russom, Senior Manager of Research and Services, TDWI, review the results of this research in the archived Webinar.
