Business Intelligence Strategy and Big Data Analytics - by Steve Williams (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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 about: 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.

Review Quotes

"Most executives are familiar with big data, business intelligence (BI), analytics, business performance management, business process management, and fact-based decision-making, but they are uncertain about how to best deploy them to create business value. In this book you will find both content and features that will help you plan and execute BI strategically.

Worthy of special mention is the treatment of big data and analytics. The hype around both topics is especially high, and it is easy to think that they are so new and different that they need to be treated in special ways. This book provides a clear understanding of the ways that big data and analytics both differ from the past but also the many ways that they are just a logical extension of what has come before. When viewed in this context, the strategic planning for BI and analytics in the world of big data is very similar to planning for BI in general.

If you need to think about BI (and all the related topics) strategically in your company, I'm confident that you will find this book to be very helpful." --Hugh Watson, Professor and C. Herman and Mary Virginia Terry Chair of Business Administration, Terry College of Business, University of Georgia and Senior Editor, Business Intelligence Journal