Business unIntelligence

Book excerpt: Business intelligence (BI) used to be so simple—in theory anyway. Integrate and copy data from your transactional systems into a specialized relational database, apply BI reporting and query tools and add business users. Job done. No longer. Analytics, big data and an array of diverse technologies have changed everything. More importantly, business is insisting on ever more value, ever faster from information and from IT in general. An emerging biz-tech ecosystem demands that business and IT work together. Business unIntelligence reflects the new reality that in today’s socially complex and rapidly changing world, business decisions must be based on a combination of rational and intuitive thinking. Integrating cues from diverse information sources and tacit knowledge, decision makers create unique meaning to innovate heuristically at the speed of thought. This book provides a wealth of new models that business and IT can use together to design support systems for tomorrow’s successful organizations. Dr. Barry Devlin, one of the earliest proponents of data warehousing, goes back to basics to explore how the modern trinity of information, process and people must be reinvented and restructured to deliver the value, insight and innovation required by modern businesses. From here, he develops a series of novel architectural models that provide a new foundation for holistic information use across the entire business. From discovery to analysis and from decision making to action taking, he defines a fully integrated, closed-loop business environment. Covering every aspect of business analytics, big data, collaborative working and more, this book takes over where BI ends to deliver the definitive framework for information use in the coming years. As the person who defined the conceptual framework and physical architecture for data warehousing in the 1980s, Barry Devlin has been an astute observer of the movement he initiated ever since. Now, in Business unIntelligence, Devlin provides a sweeping view of the past, present, and future of business intelligence, while delivering new conceptual and physical models for how to turn information into insights and action. Reading Devlin’s prose and vision of BI are comparable to reading Carl Sagan’s view of the cosmos. The book is truly illuminating and inspiring. --Wayne Eckerson, President, BI Leader Consulting Author, “Secrets of Analytical Leaders: Insights from Information Insiders”