Best business intelligence articles, 29 September - 6 October

CFOs see the business analytics skillset, including business intelligence and data mining, as a prerequisite for their accounting and finance staff. As the quantity of data available to companies grows, proficiency in this area is becoming more and more sought after.

It's like a "full body scan" for your business. Integrated with a back of house software system, a well-executed restaurant BI tool should be able to give users a detailed look at their entire business from top to bottom.

Petr Podrouzek wrote the first in a series of thirteen articles about agile business intelligence a few days ago. Antivia presents its truly agile BI tool - DecisionPoint.

IFS North America recently conducted a survey of Manufacturing Business Technology readers to find out the extent that companies were adopting business intelligence programs and to what degree those programs were being integrated with their ERP solutions.

This year I have worked with my customers on several business intelligence (BI) projects, and from what I have seen, the key to making these systems effective for the business is to go further than they allow on their own.

The rise of powerful analytics tools has led to an odd phenomenon: lack of ownership. When actionable information applies to multiple business units and generated data comes from a myriad of sources, it is easy for midsize companies to fall into a "rental" mindset: Data is simply borrowed for analysis and then stored on another department's server or offsite.