Business Intelligence For Dummies; About the Author; Dedications; Author's Acknowledgments; Contents at a Glance; Table of Contents; Introduction; About This Book; How to Use This Book; How This Book Is Organized; Icons Used in This Book; Time to Get Down to Business ... Intelligence; Part I: Introduction and Basics; Chapter 1: Understanding Business Intelligence; Limited Resources, Limitless Decisions; Business Intelligence Defined: No CIA Experience Required; The BI Value Proposition; A Brief History of BI
BI's Split Personality: Business and Technology
So, Are You BI Curious?; Chapter 2: Fitting BI with Other Technology Disciplines; Best Friends for Life: BI and Data Warehousing; ERP and BI: Taking the Enterprise to Warp Speed; Customer's Always Right; BI-BUY! E-Commerce Takes BI Online; The Finance Function and BI; Chapter 3: Meeting the BI Challenge; What's Your Problem?; The BI Spectrum ' Where Do You Want It?; First Glance at Best (and Worst) Practices; Part II: Business Intelligence User Models
Chapter 4: Basic Reporting and Querying
Power to the People!; Basic BI: Self-Service Reporting and Querying; Data Access ' BI's Push-Pull Tug-of-War; Chapter 5: OLAP: Online Analytical Processing; OLAP in Context; OLAP Application Functionality; Multidimensional Analysis; OLAP Architecture; What OLAP Can Really Do; Drill team: Working with Multidimensional Data; OLAP versus OLTP; Looking at Different OLAP Styles and Architecture; Chapter 6: Dashboards and Briefing Books; Dashboards' Origins; The Metric System
Briefing Books and Other Gadgetry; Chapter 7: Advanced /Emerging BI Technologies; Catching a Glimpse of Visualization; Steering the Way with Guided Analysis; Data Mining: Hype or Reality?; Other Trends in BI; Part III: The BI Lifecycle; Chapter 8: The BI Big Picture; So Many Methodologies, So Little Time; Customizing BI for Your Needs; Implementing BI: Get 'er Done; Chapter 9: Human Factors in BI Implementations; Star Techie: Skills Profile of a Core BI Team
Overruling Objections from the Court of User Opinion
Major in Competence; Chapter 10: Taking a Closer Look at BI Strategy; The Big Picture; Your Current BI Capabilities (or Lack Thereof); Exploring “Should-Be' BI Alternatives; Deciding “Could-Be' Alternatives; Making Your Choice; Chapter 11: Building a Solid BI Architecture and Roadmap; What a Roadmap Is (and Isn't); Centralized Versus Decentralized Architecture; BI Architecture Alternatives; Developing a Phased, Incremental BI Roadmap; Part IV: Implementing BI