Successful Business Intelligence: Unlock the Value of BI & Big Data – Book Report
Successful Business Intelligence: Unlock the Value of BI & Big Data, Second Edition is by noted BI industry expert Cindi Howson which is available in hard cover and Kindle versions.
Source: Amazon
The key difference between the Kindle and hard cover version is the Kindle version’s images are in color.
This is a newer edition from her 2007 book Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App
Back in 2007 agile BI was a hot topic, along with master data management and operational business intelligence. In this newer version cloud, big data, mobile BI are the newer topics while agile continues to be a hot topic. Cindi has updated the survey results in this book as well. Other topics covered include open-source BI and databases, something I had not considered. She has updated the agile portion of the book to include scrum methods and sprints and how they work.
What is especially interesting is all the customer case stories, crossing industries and BI vendors. They include Netflix, Medtronic, FlightStats, the Dow Chemical Company, Macy’s and more. Each company is trying to solve a different problem with Business Intelligence. Medtronic is an SAP customer, while Macy’s is using a combination of SAP BusinessObjects and Tableau.
She goes into depth discussing the business-IT partnership of BI, and the personality types associated with each. It was interesting to me to see the Meyers-Briggs personality test covered, as introverts are generally with IT while those in the business are extraverts.
What is in it for you as a customer or partner reading this book? To me it would be to benchmark your company/customer to the survey results/companies in the book. It is good to take a step back and look at the industry outlook and see what other vendors are doing with BI, Big Data, Cloud and more. How do you measure success in business intelligence? See how other companies do it in this book and see how others responded to her survey.
You can also learn about the “LOFT” effect – “Luck, Opportunity,Frustration, Threat” along with the resulting case studies at each Company. See how companies are using social media in their businesses along with the “Big Data”.
She is currently running a survey today – you can take it here
I encourage you to check out a sample chapter of this book today.