This text aims to help you to maximize the potential of Business Intelligence in your organization. It includes stories of companies that implemented BI - those that have succeeded and those that have failed.

In todayís competitive and highly dynamic environment, analyzing data to understand how the business is performing, to predict outcomes and trends, and to improve the effectiveness of business processes underlying business operations has become cri- cal. The traditional approach to reporting is no longer adequate, users now demand easy-to-use intelligent platforms and applications capable of analyzing real-time bu- ness data to provide insight and actionable information at the right time. The end goal is to improve the enterprise performance by better and timelier decision making, - abled by the availability of up-to-date, high-quality information. As a response, the notion of "real-time enterprise" has emerged and is beginning to be recognized in the industry. Gartner defines it as “using up-to-date information, getting rid of delays, and using speed for competitive advantage is what the real-time enterprise is all about. . . Indeed, the goal of the real-time enterprise is to act on events as they happen. ” Although there has been progress in this direction and many com- nies are introducing products toward making this vision a reality, there is still a long way to go. In particular, the whole lifecycle of business intelligence requires new techniques and methodologies capable of dealing with the new requirements imposed by the real-time enterprise.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the First International Workshop on Business Intelligence for the Real-Time Enterprise, BIRTE 2006, held in Seoul, Korea in September 2006 in conjunction with VLDB 2006, the International Conference on Very Large Data Bases. The papers discuss the five major aspects of business intelligence for the real-time enterprise.

A Complete Blueprint for Maximizing the Value of Business Intelligence in the Enterprise The typical enterprise recognizes the immense potential of business intelligence (BI) and its impact upon many facets within the organization—but it’s not easy to transform BI’s potential into real business value. In The New Era of Enterprise Business Intelligence, top BI expert Mike Biere presents a complete blueprint for creating winning BI strategies and infrastructure, and systematically maximizing the value of information throughout the enterprise. This product-independent guide brings together start-to-finish guidance and practical checklists for every senior IT executive, planner, strategist, implementer, and the actual business users themselves. Drawing on thousands of hours working with enterprise customers, Biere helps decision-makers choose from today’s unprecedented spectrum of options, including the latest BI platform suites and appliances. He offers practical, “in-the-trenches” insights on a wide spectrum of planning and implementation issues, from segmenting and supporting users to working with unstructured data. Coverage includes Understanding the scope of today’s BI solutions and how they fit into existing infrastructure Assessing new options such as SaaS and cloud-based technologies Avoiding technology biases and other “project killers” Developing effective RFIs/RFPs and proofs of concept Setting up competency centers and planning for skills development Crafting a better experience for all your business users Supporting the requirements of senior executives, including performance management Cost-justifying BI solutions and measuring success Working with enterprise content management, text analytics, and search Planning and constructing portals, mashups, and other user interfaces Previewing the future of BI

The basic idea of the real-time enterprise is to become quicker. A business which wants to become a real-time enterprise has to acquire three main abilities: - Internal and external data is integrated quickly and in real time in a well-organized company data pool, - Analyses of information in the company data pool can be obtained in real time, across function boundaries and at the touch of a button, - The number of working steps performed in batch mode is shifting dramatically in favor of immediate completion in real time. The issue of communications - or real-time communications - plays a special role here. Studies have shown that processing times sometimes double when necessary communication events are handled in batch mode in the business process and not in real time. In other words, when an activity cannot be completed and lies around for days because an urgently needed partner cannot be contacted. The necessity of acquiring these three abilities has implications for the process-related, technical and organizational aspects of a business that are dealt with in detail in this book.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the First International Workshop on Business Intelligence for the Real-Time Enterprise, BIRTE 2006, held in Seoul, Korea in September 2006 in conjunction with VLDB 2006, the International Conference on Very Large Data Bases. The papers discuss the five major aspects of business intelligence for the real-time enterprise.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed conference proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Business Intelligence for the Real-Time Enterprise, BIRTE 2013, held in Riva del Garda, Italy, in August 2013 and of the 8th International Workshop on Business Intelligence for the Real-Time Enterprise, BIRTE 2014, held in Hangzhou, China, in September 2014, in conjunction with VLDB 2013 and 2014, the International Conference on Very Large Data Bases. The BIRTE workshop series provides a forum for the discussion and advancement of the science and engineering enabling real-time business intelligence and the novel applications that build on these foundational techniques. This volume contains five full, two short, and two demo papers, which were carefully reviewed and selected with an acceptance rate of 45%. In addition, one keynote and three invited papers are included.