Business Intelligence Strategy and Big Data Analytics: A General Management Perspective

by Steve Williams

Business Intelligence Strategy and Big Data Analytics is written for business leaders, managers, and analysts - people who are involved with advancing the use of BI at their companies or who need to better understand what BI is and how it can be used to improve profitability.  It is written from a general management perspective, and it draws on observations at 12 companies whose annual revenues range between $500 million and $20 billion.  Over the past 15 years, my company has formulated vendor-neutral business-focused BI strategies and program execution plans in collaboration with manufacturers, distributors, retailers, logistics companies, insurers, investment companies, credit unions, and utilities, among others.  It is through these experiences that we have validated business-driven BI strategy formulation methods and identified common enterprise BI program execution challenges. In recent years, terms like “big data” and “big data analytics” have been introduced into the business and technical lexicon.  Upon close examination, the newer terminology is about the same thing that BI has always been analyzing the vast amounts of data that companies generate and/or purchase in the course of business as a means of improving profitability and competitiveness.  Accordingly, we will use the terms BI and business intelligence throughout the book, and we will discuss the newer concepts like big data as appropriate.  More broadly, the goal of this book is to share methods and observations that will help companies achieve BI success and thereby increase revenues, reduce costs, or both.

240 pages, Paperback

Published April 21, 2016

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author with this name in the Goodreads database.

Founder and CEO of DecisionPath Consulting, specializing formulating business-driven, technically-savvy strategies for leveraging business intelligence, analytics, and big data to improve profits. Maryland, USA

Reviews

[Sam Motes]

This book does a good job of building the story of what Business Intelligence is and identify companies who can benefit from its usage. BI is not a cheap implementation if done right so the author focuses on pulling the reader through the hype and reality to understand if BI is worth investigating for their business depending on their market and maturity as a company. The author also digs into the difference between Big Data versus Data Warehouse technologies to understand that many companies my not need the unstructured data value of Big Data but can still benefit greatly from Data Warehouse to better organize the disparate data across their organization to drive timely decision making. The book also does a great job of identifying BIOS (BI Opportunities) within the business to determine where to focus first to drive value quickly and incrementally for the business.