Business intelligence (BI) and analytics today are top priorities for business and IT leaders worldwide. Information is recognized as a strategic asset, to enhance corporate performance, increase competitiveness, maximize efficiencies, and to better comply with regulations. Data warehousing itself has been around for about two decades, but some important architectural issues were not addressed in first-generation data warehouses, including the following:
The recognition of the lifecycle of data within the data warehouse. Data has a life cycle as it is gathered, aggregated, analyzed, disseminated, and eventually archived or destroyed.
The incorporation of unstructured data along with structured data as part of the modern data warehouse.
Metadata. Both local and global metadata are an integral part of the modern BI - and data warehouse environment.
Master data management (MDM) is also an integral part of the data warehouse environment.
The synergies of services oriented architectures (SOA) and BI leading to more flexible type of composite BI.
The need for integrity of integrated data and the need for online transaction processing data, and for embedding analytics into processes.
Finally, reduction in administration work, via new types of lean consumption and management.
Today I want to invite you to collaborate with your peers, with SAP, and with me to shape the next generation of SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence. Below you will find a link to an online survey that will take about ten minutes to complete. If you are involved in a BI project, we want to hear from you. You don't have to be an SAP customer, and we promise you won't have some sales guy calling you as a result of your participation. What we are interested in is your professional experience and opinion. All participants will receive a complimentary electronic whitepaper from me on the topic of Textual Analytics. And, SAP will choose one survey participant to receive a Video iPod. Finally, we plan to share our findings with you in upcoming weeks, so stay tuned. The survey will be open until February 9th, 2007. I'm looking forward to hearing from you! Regards, Bill Inmon Survey Link: Thank you! The survey is now officially closed. Stay tuned, however. We'll announce who's won the iPod, and we'll share with you some of what we've learned. Thanks for your participation! The SDN Community has really stepped up here; we received well over 1000 responses!
