The New Era of Enterprise Business Intelligence: Using Analytics to Achieve a Global Competitive Advantage

A Complete Blueprint for Maximizing the Value of Business Intelligence in the Enterprise

The typical enterprise recognizes the immense potential of business intelligence (BI) and its impact upon many facets within the organization–but it’s not easy to transform BI’s potential into real business value. In The New Era of Enterprise Business Intelligence, top BI expert Mike Biere presents a complete blueprint for creating winning BI strategies and infrastructure, and systematically maximizing the value of information throughout the enterprise.

This product-independent guide brings together start-to-finish guidance and practical checklists for every senior IT executive, planner, strategist, implementer, and the actual business users themselves. Drawing on thousands of hours working with enterprise customers, Biere helps decision-makers choose from today’s unprecedented spectrum of options, including the latest BI platform suites and appliances. He offers practical, “in-the-trenches” insights on a wide spectrum of planning and implementation issues, from segmenting and supporting users to working with unstructured data.

Coverage includes

• Understanding the scope of today’s BI solutions and how they fit into existing infrastructure

• Assessing new options such as SaaS and cloud-based technologies

• Avoiding technology biases and other “project killers”

• Developing effective RFIs/RFPs and proofs of concept

• Setting up competency centers and planning for skills development

• Crafting a better experience for all your business users

• Supporting the requirements of senior executives, including performance management

• Cost-justifying BI solutions and measuring success

• Working with enterprise content management, text analytics, and search

• Planning and constructing portals, mashups, and other user interfaces

• Previewing the future of BI

Mike Biere has 32 years of experience in the IT industry. He began working for IBM in 1978 as a large systems System Engineer but found his calling for Business Intelligence in 1981 when the Information Center initiative began. He has worked in the database and end user computing areas since then.

He has served in a variety of roles within IBM, from BI Technical Sales Specialist to world-wide Marketing Manager of Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence solutions. Mike served as Executive Vice President of Ferguson Information Systems in the mid-90s and was responsible for building a BI practice. He worked for Cognos from 2003―2007 as Director of Product Management, responsible for Cognos’ initiatives with IBM.

Mike returned to IBM in 2007 and holds a position of Sr. Marketing Manager for Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence on System z as a world-wide support resource.

He has written a book on BI entitled Business Intelligence for the Enterprise (IBM Press (2003); ISBN: 978-0-13-141303-0), as well as being co-author of another IBM book entitled New Intelligence for a Smarter Planet (MC Press (2009); ISBN: 978-1-58347-086-2). Mike also has written numerous journal articles and white papers. Mike is married with a grown son and daughter and resides in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is the proud grandfather of Julian, Noah, Elijah, Chris, Nick, and Leilani. His real passion beyond BI is playing guitar in a retro rock band called Those Guys.