Articles/Blogs of the Week: 12/29/2006

Every week, we try to outline the best articles and blogs from the past week. Below are the articles/blogs for this week:

• Business Unintelligence: I stumbled upon this brief article. Though short, I've added it to this list because of its argument of what "real-time" should mean in BI. Simply, "real time should mean now, not some time in the future, when the data is extracted, loaded, re-consolidated and then inquired upon." In other words, "real time" data is data available immediately. If there is a change in the source, it must be reflected in the reports immediately to be considered real-time. Not 5 seconds, 5 minutes or 5 hours later.
• The Information Black Hole: This is a rather detailed study of why BI is not delivering the value it should in the UK. I found it interesting.
• Personas, Customer Value, Customer Retention and Non-line Marketing: This article from the "Occam’s Razor" blog provides some segmentation examples and ideas on how to represent an organization's capabilities vs. customer expectations.
• Business intelligence expert predictions for 2007: Predictions from "experts" on what 2007 will bring.

Have a Happy New Year from your friends at Thoughts on Business Intelligence