addition, specialized expertise in the selected tools and technologies is needed to ensure that the tools are installed, configured, and used as intended.

Industry players segment the market into what might be called macro-categories, for

order-to-cash cycle time: the total elapsed time between when a customer’s order was received and when payment was received for the order.

The incoming source data is typically very detailed and is often referred to as “atomic-level data.”

and how it would generate the incremental revenue and/or reduced costs from the BI-driven process change.

In our experience, the low end of BI annual investments by major companies in a variety of industries falls between $1 million and $5 million for departmental or functional BI investments.

the job of the BI architectures is to provide the foundation for delivering business information that works together and provides a “single version of the truth” that guides actions that improve business performance.

For example, we worked with a client several years ago who was used to generating a campaign mailing list from valid names in a database. To improve the response rate and reduce the marketing costs associated with obtaining a response, a BI application was developed to support customer segmentation analysis and to generate a targeted list of high-p

operates a dedicated technical environment for BI. The environment contains servers, an RDBMS, an ETL tool, and a query and reporting tool. There are separate technical environments for development, test, and production, so each environment can be optimized for its role.