You are probably sitting on a 'gold mine' of terabytes of data and information that is held within your organisation. The trouble is I guess - you can't readily access or analyse it to;

• Improve Revenue
• Avoid or Reduce costs or
• Improve Service

Sometimes the management culture within an organisation is to run things from the 'gut' not from hard evidence or facts. They are possibly so hassled that they do not even consider a data driven decision making process.

Some managers don't have the vision or belief that by using BI or data mining, the technologies, applications and practices for the collection, integration, analysis, to present information so that better decisions can be taken about enhancing the performance.

Many managers have tried, as Business Intelligence projects are becoming more widespread, but success has been limited.

Only 30 to 50% of projects succeed! Why?

Here are a few reasons:

1) Project using traditional technologies take a long time on average 12 to 18 months to complete. Of course many managers do not know what they really want until they see it. Changing the structure of the solutions is slow and time consuming and needs experts to do it.

2) IT departments are already busy and overloaded so changes and new projects take ages! IT departments often don't understand the business and so implement their own ideas which are not truly relevant.

3) The underlying data has often to be extracted, transferred, and loaded (ETL) from a myriad of different systems into a data warehouse on which the BI software operates. This is tedious and time-consuming. Further, often the integrity of the underlying data is also suspect.

4) With terabytes of data in some organisation the performance of the querying and reporting system is slow and not conducive to promoting the use of data to support decision making.

5) The expertise to change and manipulate the BI system lies in the hands of a few experts and managers and employees are unable to change it for themselves as requires a high degree of expertise.

6) The presentation of information sometimes does not excite, stimulate further use, or is difficult to interpret.

So how do we solve these problems. This site has the answers, but first it gives you a grounding in the basics - what actually is Business Intelligence (BI), Data Mining, Data Warehousing, Performance Management, the principles of Decision Making and Goal Setting, Balanced Scorecards, etc.

Finally I detail the 'how to's' ... what is the current best practice and I will you about some exciting new technologies which remove many of the issues above.