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Quick Takes for the Week of August 17


August 21: Of course, nobody knows the fate of healthcare reform. But any overhaul to the system would be great news for the IT industry in general and the BI sector in particular, according to Forrester Research principal analyst Boris Evelson. He begins this InformationWeek piece with a look at what is wrong with modern IT and describes the role BI can play in the solution.

August 20: It’s an unfortunate reality that print newspapers are stressed to the point of breaking and need all the help they can get. This press release is interesting in showing how BI can help even this old and staid industry improve its prospects. The claim is that Alterian’s integrated marketing platform – which includes targeted segment analytics – has helped the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel increase its direct mail subscriber acquisition rate by 36 percent and cut expenses by 41 compared to last year.

August 19: SearchCIO-Midmarket.com offers an exhaustive and well done look at the current state of BI deployments. The story focuses on the Montana State Fund, TiVo and the Grafton School, a healthcare non-profit. The bottom line seems to be that much progress is being made, but that much remains to be done. Says writer Christine Cignoli: “[Companies’] road to nirvana — stores of clean, rich, integrated data accessed easily by those who need it — is a journey that’s barely begun.”

April 17: Larry Zagata of MiPro Consulting uses this post to discuss the best way approach to business intelligence requirements gathering. The key, he says, is to take a deep look at the business processes involved and identify key questions raised by those processes. Zagata illustrates with an example in the packaged goods/retail sector.

–Carl Weinschenk