Editorial Policies and Submission Guidelines

Care to share your insight, business strategies and solutions using Information Builders' technology with our other readers?

Information Builders Magazine accepts drafts, outlines or story ideas from its customers and partners or from experienced freelance writers for articles aimed at educating our readers about trends in the IT industry or at making them more successful using our software.

Before submitting an article for publication, please familiarize yourself with the magazine's format to get a sense of the style and the type of content our audience wants.

Length

	Customer success stories should be roughly 1,000 to 1,800 words
	Partner profiles and news roundup pieces may run approximately 250 to 500 words
	Interviews with industry experts and articles on industry trends are typically 1,000 to 1,500 words

Content

	All stories should reflect a high-level rather than a technical approach
	Content should be newsworthy and should not be self-promoting
	The business value should be highlighted, i.e., talk about ROI, include savings in time, money and people; increased productivity and efficiency, increased satisfaction (customers, managers, employees, partners, suppliers ); improved ability to compete
	•	Emphasize business uses that enable initiatives with current market appeal:
		·	B2B (Extranet), B2C (Internet), and B2E (back office; intranet) initiatives
		·	CRM
		·	SCM
	Connect the business value with the technological value
	•	Speed-to-market-how fast they got the application up
	•	Ease of use and maintenance-statements like, "We can run it ourselves. It's easy for us to maintain."
	•	Use an organizing framework for the products: how they use our data warehousing, business intelligence, and enterprise integration solutions.
	•	If other vendors' products are involved, emphasize that our problems work hand-in-glove with them, that we're a technology enabler.
	Emphasize the competitive value of our solution
	•	When giving reasons for choosing our solution, focus on the total value of the solution:
		·	Fast implementation
		·	Scalability
		·	End-to-end solution
		·	Flexibility
		·	Power to handle complex demands
	Keep the technological solution clear, including the following information:
	•	What software of ours they use
	•	What platform they use (hardware, such as IBM mainframe, Sun Solaris)
	•	What operating system software
	•	What data structures they're going against
	•	Scale of application-number of users
	Snapshot
	•	50-60 words
		·	The Challenge (includes the business and technological challenge-what were the obstacles, where was the pain)
		·	The Strategy (what they did about it and how we helped them)
		·	The Results (costs saved, revenues generated, improved services, streamlined processes, business growth enabled)
		·	Information Builders Solution
			· List Consulting, Education, if relevant
			· Keep product names as simple as possible-WebFOCUS,        iWay, EDA, FOCUS
	(300 DPI JPEG or 35mm slides preferred)

Avoid any special formatting in the document. If your article includes graphics or screen shots, please include these as separate files, clearly labeled and cross-referenced in the text.

Link to customer or partner web site

How to Submit Articles and Story Ideas

E-mail an MS Word or text document plus any attachments, or address any questions to editor@ibi.com and include your name, e-mail address, postal mailing address and daytime phone number. Articles may be edited for length and style. Publication in the print and/or online editions of the Magazine will depend on available space, will be at the discretion of the editorial committee, and subject to editorial timetables.