Best business intelligence articles, 24 November - 1 December

Summary: Big data is a big deal, but how do you get started and get it right? Here's some advice from IT experts working on successful projects. Organisations are collecting more information than ever before, yet the business is unlikely to be able to make sense of this information unless it finds ways to turn newly found knowledge into game-changing decisions.

If you look at the field of business intelligence, it's as though there's a storm brewing. If you wanted to be fanciful, you'd say that it's made up of big data, which is information at a far deeper level than ever been imagined (information that can be shared on a device no bigger than a paperback book) and cloud computing, that can give more people scalable, affordable access to that information than ever before.

As a business you will no doubt have all kinds of data coming from different parts of your company. You might have your sales orders in a CRM system and your delivery information as an XML extract from your supply chain system, meaning the data you need to make decisions isn't in a consistent, useable state.

Curiosity may indeed have killed some cats by tempting them into danger. But the impulse to explore also leads them to find new homes, new hunting grounds and new mates. Their playfulness gives them practice and sharpens reactions for when they really need them.

The victories won by data science specialists such as Palantir, Opera Solutions, and Teradata's Think Big have shown the power of advanced analytics and machine learning to solve high value problems. But these companies focus quite a bit on what I call Bottom of the Funnel Business Intelligence, that is solving problems that involve high value decisions that take place in a well-understood context.