Enterprise Business Intelligence White Papers and Technology Briefs

Hot Off The Presses

Please select one or more papers from the list below by checking the box to the left of each paper and clicking "submit" at the bottom of the page.

Featured Reports and Papers

Business Intelligence Best Practices for Dashboard Design

Dashboards help organizations make better business decisions. The way in which they are created is not trivial and attention must be paid to the details. Employing visual design standards and principles are important, but are only part of the journey. The way in which data is integrated from the enterprise is just as important. It requires proper planning to address what users need to see, where the data is coming from, how soon it can be delivered, and ensuring that it is accurate and consistent.
Business Intelligence: The Strategic Imperative for CIOs

The CIO's role becomes more strategic as organizations use information to create a competitive advantage. This paper – using evidence from benchmarks created with IBM to test WebFOCUS' performance on System z running z/OS and Linux – helps CIOs to balance demands for information accessibility and processing power.

Ventana Research: Information Builders Aims at Operational BI

Many organizations want to bring hundreds, even thousands, of employees and partners closer to their customers and supply chains. Information Builders aims to enable such operational BI, which merges dashboard interfaces, event alerts, metrics, search, and other new features with BI reporting and analysis. Ventana Research believes that the company's latest developments will improve its competitive position in the marketplace.

Worst Practices in Business Intelligence: Why BI Applications Succeed Where BI Tools Fail

This paper provides insight into the top four worst practices for business intelligence. It also provides guidance on how to avoid or overcome worst practices in order to tap into the true power of BI. By reading this paper, you will have a solid understanding of how to avoid BI failure and achieve success with your BI initiatives.
Controlling Excel Chaos With Business Intelligence

Providing direct, secure access from Microsoft Excel to corporate data presents a significant challenge. This paper first outlines the vulnerabilities of Excel, and explores strategies to counteract these shortfalls. It then describes push solutions that serve up corporate data from centralized Excel sourcebooks and add-in desktop functionality that lets expert Excel users pull data directly from corporate data sources. And finally, it proposes structured ad hoc applications that are flexible and agile in answering the impromptu questions of non-expert Excel users. This paper was updated in August 2007 to include information about WebFOCUS Quick Data, our add-in feature for Excel.

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