Introduction

I never had any intention of becoming a blogger--not that there's anything wrong with blogging. It may be too little, too late and I certainly feel like the boy with his finger in the dike, but there needs to be a voice of reason in cyberspace when it comes to the latest HOT topic, Business Intelligence.

I am leveraging more than 20 years of data management experience here, so I'm going to try to avoid the bling and get to the meat. Since so much of the BI (short for business intelligence) stream is bling, frills, bells and whistles, I should be able to keep these relatively short.

I'll inaugurate this spot with the assertion that if there is no meat to what you're seeing--if the information isn't "actionable", then it doesn't matter how it's presented. That means that if you've blown your budget on presentation (ex., dashboard) tools but you've never spent a cent on a data quality assessment and you don't have process consistency or even documented processes, then you won't get intelligence.

That's enough for an intro. More tomorrow.