Curt Hall

A survey we conducted in November 2004 of end-user organizations undertaking business performance management initiatives found that almost half were required to make changes to existing business processes in order to support implementing their business performance management solutions.

In this Advisor, I want to discuss what I consider one of the most important developments in business process management: the ability to monitor the efficiency of distributed business processes in near real time.

Everyone seems to agree that the deployment of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology will result in a massive explosion of data. This, of course, brings up an important question: How are organizations going to solve the analysis challenges presented by the deluge of data flowing from manufacturing, point-of-sale (POS), distribution, and inventory management systems by way of RFID tags?

A reader wrote to tell me that he's witnessed various enterprise information integration (EII) proponents (mostly vendors) alluding to the notion that EII is a replacement for data warehousing. I've also encountered articles and advertisements pushing the idea that EII technology somehow lessens or removes the need for organizations to use a data warehouse. Although EII is definitely an important enabling technology for BI, it is not a replacement for data warehousing. Rather, EII and data warehousing should be considered complementary technologies.

How well do an organization's data warehousing practices support enterprise business intelligence (BI) efforts? Cutter Consortium conducted a survey of 145 worldwide end-user organizations on the adoption and use of data warehousing and BI technology in an effort to answer this question.