business intelligence - News, Features, and Slideshows

Features

  • Why businesses should focus on wide data, not Big Data

    In these heady days of Big Data, a lot of organisations treat data collection like a Pokémon game: Gotta catch it all. But Dane Atkinson, CEO of cross-platform marketing analytics specialist, SumAll, says most organizations need to think wide, not big, when it comes to data.

    Written by Thor Olavsrud14 March 15 02:23
  • Cloud BI: Going where the data lives

    Historically, cloud BI has been mostly used by smaller businesses, but larger enterprises are starting to make the trek.

    Written by Nancy Gohring20 Aug. 14 20:48
  • 9 Common BI Software Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them)

    According to Gartner, business Intelligence and analytics will remain a top focus for CIOs through 2017, with companies spending millions on traditional BI software, cloud BI services and now mobile apps and even social BI. However, as the type and number of BI solutions has grown, so too has the possibility of failure, of picking the wrong business intelligence software for your business problem or problems or of having end users not understand or properly use the solution.

    Written by Jennifer Lonoff Schiff13 Aug. 14 05:40
  • 7 things marketing wants to say to IT

    Attention, IT: As marketing goes all-digital, your CMO needs more from you than back-office support. Are you ready to be a marketing partner?

    Written by Mary K. Pratt05 Feb. 14 12:28
  • How analytics helped Ford turn its fortunes

    Big data and analytics permeate virtually every move Ford makes, from forecasting the worldwide price of commodities to figuring out what exactly consumers want, what it will build, where it should source parts and how to power its lineup of vehicles.

    Written by Julia King02 Dec. 13 11:33
  • For CMOs Big Data Can Lead to Big Profits

    It's become a common refrain that marketers need to become more data-driven. This infographic breaks down the pressures that chief marketing officers are under and the upside to embracing big data.

    Written by Thor Olavsrud21 Nov. 13 18:32
  • Big data blues: The dangers of data mining

    Companies are taking matters into their own hands with internal controls, open privacy policies, ethical codes and greater candor over how they're collecting and parsing personal data. But many wonder whether it's enough to allay consumers' fears as techniques for manipulating data multiply.

    Written by Cindy Waxer04 Nov. 13 10:05
  • Big data for IT forensics

    One of the earlier business applications to analyze massive volume of data from a variety of sources is IT forensics. Besides using traditional eDiscovery tools to handle unstructured data and analytical tools to analyze transactional data separately, IT forensic experts are turning towards big data for a comprehensive approach to speed up analysis.

    Written by Sheila Lam06 Aug. 13 18:28
  • How IT could have prevented the financial meltdown

    In the coming weeks the feds and the surviving financial services institutions will have the daunting task of unraveling all the securitized loans and other instruments that are hiding the toxic investments. But does the technology exist to do that? And if so, could it have been used to prevent the bad debt from hitting the fan in the first place?

    Written by Ephraim Schwartz25 Sept. 08 09:05
  • If the price is right

    If you arrive at a convention hotel without a booking in the middle of an exhibition and there is a room available, you will be paying more than the regular tariff. On the other hand, many inner-city hotels that rely on business travellers have cheap weekend rates on Saturday nights designed to attract customers who would not be interested in staying otherwise.
    The hotel industry has long been aware that customer demand for its product varies, depending on the time and day. As a result, hotel tariffs, which are designed to maximise both revenue and occupancy rates by pricing along customer-demand curves, change. In a nutshell, this is "price optimisation" - adjusting price according to the customer's willingness to pay, or demand-side pricing. The same is true of the airline industry: it is rare to sit next to someone on a plane who has paid the same price as you.

    Written by Mike Hanley22 Aug. 07 22:00
  • Not just cubes

    Business optimisation and accountability are among the big issues which have continued to pump life into the data query, analysis and reporting software genre. It has in the past been called the Executive Information System, the “everybody information system” (when it was realised that not just top management could benefit from a digested view of the organisation’s performance) and, in one of its most recent incarnations, Business Intelligence.
    The latest use to which analysis software has been put is Business Performance Management or, as Gartner prefers to call it, Corporate Performance Management (CPM). But it’s more than just the same thing under a different name. Previous analytical engines resided in something of a compartment of their own. The data from the company’s day-to-day operations was piped into them by a process known as Extract Transform and Load (ETL) and reorganised into “cubes”, a suitable format for cross-tabulating and graphing the data on multiple axes.

    Written by Stephen Bell07 Aug. 07 22:00