Unlock your potential and lead the future with this essential guide to thriving, creating, and innovating with confidence in the age of intelligence. Embark on a transformative journey with Becoming An AI Orchestrator: A Business Professional's Guide to Leading, Creating, and Thriving in the Age of Intelligence. This book is your essential guide to navigating the age of intelligence, where technology and creativity converge. Whether you're a creator, knowledge worker, or leader, you'll find invaluable insights and practical advice to help you thrive in this new era. From understanding the forces that have shaped our technological landscape to embracing the opportunities and challenges of AI, this book empowers you to lead, create, and innovate with confidence. Discover the power of AI and unlock your potential. Through engaging stories and expert guidance, you'll learn how to harness AI to enhance your work and life. This book is not just about technology; it's about empowering you to bring your visions to life and make a meaningful impact. With a focus on creativity, adaptability, and collaboration, Becoming An AI Orchestrator is your roadmap to success in a rapidly evolving world. Join the ranks of those who are not just adapting to change but leading it.

Discover the power of Looker for Business Intelligence and data visualization in this comprehensive cookbook. This book serves as your guide to mastering Looker's tools and features, enabling you to transform data into actionable insights. What this Book will help me do Understand Looker's key components, including LookML and dashboards. Explore advanced Looker capabilities, including data modeling and interactivity. Create dynamic dashboards to monitor and present critical metrics effectively. Integrate Looker with additional tools and systems to extend its capabilities. Leverage Looker's tools for fostering data-driven decision-making within your team. Author(s) Khrystyna Grynko is a seasoned data professional with extensive experience in Business Intelligence and analytics. She brings practical insights into how to effectively utilize Looker for real-world applications. Khrystyna is known for her clear, instructional writing style that makes complex topics approachable. Who is it for? This book is an essential resource for business analysts, data analysts, or BI developers looking to expand their expertise in Looker. Suitable for readers with a basic understanding of business intelligence concepts. Ideal for professionals who aim to leverage Looker for creating insightful and interactive data applications to inform business strategy.

This book is a valuable resource for academics, researchers, professionals, and policymakers who are interested in understanding the potential of AI in the business world. The contributions from leading experts and researchers provide a comprehensive overview of AI in business applications, and how it is transforming different sectors.

Embark on your business intelligence career with 'Business Intelligence Career Master Plan'. This book provides you with a clear roadmap, actionable insights, and expert advice to help you navigate the challenges of building a successful career in BI. You'll learn everything from identifying your starting point in BI to developing critical skills in data analysis, visualization, and management. What this Book will help me do Understand various business intelligence roles and their responsibilities to find your ideal BI career path. Develop expertise in using tools like Power BI and databases like AdventureWorks to handle and analyze data effectively. Master the art of creating informative and compelling data visualizations to tell impactful data stories. Gain the technical skills needed for programming and system development to excel in the BI field. Learn how to automate and optimize BI workflows to enhance productivity and efficiency. Author(s) The authors, None Chavez and None Moncada, excel in mentoring aspiring business intelligence professionals. With vast experience in BI systems and project management, they aim to make technical concepts accessible and fascinating. Their hands-on guidance empowers readers to build essential skills and thrive in the BI field. Who is it for? This book is ideal for aspiring business intelligence developers and data analysts eager to advance their careers. If you're passionate about data and enjoy solving complex problems, this resource will equip you with the knowledge and tools to succeed. Starting with a foundational understanding of common tools like Excel and SQL is recommended to get the most out of this book.

Business Analytics, is driven by an increasing demand from the real world. This book reviews advances in data analytics and business intelligence that assists industries in problem-solving exercises, with a view to driving competitive advantage.

Use business intelligence to power corporate growth, increase efficiency, and improve corporate decision making. With this practical book featuring hands-on examples in Power BI with basic Python and R code, you'll explore the most relevant AI use cases for BI, including improved forecasting, automated classification, and AI-powered recommendations. And you'll learn how to draw insights from unstructured data sources like text, document, and image files. Author Tobias Zwingmann helps BI professionals, business analysts, and data analytics understand high-impact areas of artificial intelligence. You'll learn how to leverage popular AI-as-a-service and AutoML platforms to ship enterprise-grade proofs of concept without the help of software engineers or data scientists. Learn how AI can generate business impact in BI environments Use AutoML for automated classification and improved forecasting Implement recommendation services to support decision-making Draw insights from text data at scale with NLP services Extract information from documents and images with computer vision services Build interactive user frontends for AI-powered dashboard prototypes Implement an end-to-end case study for building an AI-powered customer analytics dashboard

Artificial intelligence can yield powerful results when applied to business intelligence. Whether it’s pattern recognition in words, numbers, and big datasets or optimizing processes and expediting outcomes, AI is becoming a critical business component. In this report, Michael Norris from IBM explains how to drive AI adoption in your company. What does it mean to infuse AI into BI? It means business users can discover actionable, easy-to-understand insights on their own, independently from IT—even while remaining within the organization’s secure and governed IT architecture. Explore how AI in BI helps you to "get to the why" when analyzing and optimizing the insights you discover. Learn how AI-infused business intelligence: Enables line-of-business users to easily discover data-driven insights without requiring specialized data science expertise Allows users to ask questions in plain language with intuitive exploration tools to gain deeper insight into their data Provides recommended visualizations and dashboards to present compelling, concise, and explainable data Prepares datasets for analysis to free up IT analysts and line-of-business users

Use machine learning and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) as a comprehensive BI solution. This book follows a when-to, why-to, and how-to approach to explain the key steps involved in utilizing the artificial intelligence components now available for a successful OBIEE implementation. Oracle Business Intelligence with Machine Learning covers various technologies including using Oracle OBIEE, R Enterprise, Spatial Maps, and machine learning for advanced visualization and analytics. The machine learning material focuses on learning representations of input data suitable for a given prediction problem. This book focuses on the practical aspects of implementing machine learning solutions using the rich Oracle BI ecosystem. The primary objective of this book is to bridge the gap between the academic state-of-the-art and the industry state-of-the-practice by introducing you to machine learning with OBIEE. What You Will Learn See machine learning in OBIEE Master the fundamentals of machine learning and how it pertains to BI and advanced analytics Gain an introduction to Oracle R Enterprise Discover the practical considerations of implementing machine learning with OBIEE Who This Book Is For Analytics managers, BI architects and developers, and data scientists.

Learn Business Intelligence Markup Language (Biml) for automating much of the repetitive, manual labor involved in data integration. We teach you how to build frameworks and use advanced Biml features to get more out of SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), Transact-SQL (T-SQL), and SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) than you ever thought possible. The first part of the book starts with the basics—getting your development environment configured, Biml syntax, and scripting essentials. Whether a beginner or a seasoned Biml expert, the next part of the book guides you through the process of using Biml to build a framework that captures both your design patterns and execution management. Design patterns are reusable code blocks that standardize the approach you use to perform certain types of data integration, logging, and other key data functions. Design patterns solve common problems encountered when developing data integration solutions. Because you do not have to build the code from scratch each time, design patterns improve your efficiency as a Biml developer. In addition to leveraging design patterns in your framework, you will learn how to build a robust metadata store and how to package your framework into Biml bundles for deployment within your enterprise. In the last part of the book, we teach you more advanced Biml features and capabilities, such as SSAS development, T-SQL recipes, documentation autogeneration, and Biml troubleshooting. The Biml Book: Provides practical and applicable examples Teaches you how to use Biml to reduce development time while improving quality Takes you through solutions to common data integration and BI challenges What You'll Learn Master the basics of Business Intelligence Markup Language (Biml) Study patterns for automating SSIS package generation Build a Biml Framework Import and transform database schemas Automate generation of scripts and projects Who This Book Is For BI developers wishing to quickly locate previously tested solutions, Microsoft BI specialists, those seeking more information about solution automation and code generation, and practitioners of Data Integration Lifecycle Management (DILM) in the DevOps enterprise

Rapid technology change is impacting organizations large and small. Mobile and Cloud computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), and “Big Data” are driving forces in organizational digital transformation. Decision support and analytics are available to many people in a business or organization. Business professionals need to learn about and understand computerized decision support for organizations to succeed. This text is targeted to busy managers and students who need to grasp the basics of computerized decision support, including: What is analytics? What is a decision support system? What is “Big Data”? What are “Big Data” business use cases? Overall, it addresses 61 fundamental questions. In a short period of time, readers can “get up to speed” on decision support, analytics, and business intelligence. The book then provides a quick reference to important recurring questions.

Learn how to transition from Excel-based business intelligence (BI) analysis to enterprise stacks of open-source BI tools. Select and implement the best free and freemium open-source BI tools for your company's needs and design, implement, and integrate BI automation across the full stack using agile methodologies. Business Intelligence Tools for Small Companies provides hands-on demonstrations of open-source tools suitable for the BI requirements of small businesses. The authors draw on their deep experience as BI consultants, developers, and administrators to guide you through the extract-transform-load/data warehousing (ETL/DWH) sequence of extracting data from an enterprise resource planning (ERP) database freely available on the Internet, transforming the data, manipulating them, and loading them into a relational database. The authors demonstrate how to extract, report, and dashboard key performance indicators (KPIs) in a visually appealing format from the relational database management system (RDBMS). They model the selection and implementation of free and freemium tools such as Pentaho Data Integrator and Talend for ELT, Oracle XE and MySQL/MariaDB for RDBMS, and Qliksense, Power BI, and MicroStrategy Desktop for reporting. This richly illustrated guide models the deployment of a small company BI stack on an inexpensive cloud platform such as AWS. What You'll Learn You will learn how to manage, integrate, and automate the processes of BI by selecting and implementing tools to: Implement and manage the business intelligence/data warehousing (BI/DWH) infrastructure Extract data from any enterprise resource planning (ERP) tool Process and integrate BI data using open-source extract-transform-load (ETL) tools Query, report, and analyze BI data using open-source visualization and dashboard tools Use a MOLAP tool to define next year's budget, integrating real data with target scenarios Deploy BI solutions and big data experiments inexpensively on cloud platforms Who This Book Is For Engineers, DBAs, analysts, consultants, and managers at small companies with limited resources but whose BI requirements have outgrown the limitations of Excel spreadsheets; personnel in mid-sized companies with established BI systems who are exploring technological updates and more cost-efficient solutions

This book, "Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 12c," is a comprehensive guide to understanding and implementing Oracle's powerful business intelligence tools. Throughout its chapters, readers will learn how to install, configure, and utilize OBIEE 12c to transform organizational data into actionable insights through reports, dashboards, and advanced analytics. What this Book will help me do Install and configure Oracle BI 12c, preparing the essential software and database infrastructure. Create and manage the repository connecting your data to the OBIEE front end for detailed analysis. Develop interactive dashboards and analyses that derive actionable meaning from data. Design pixel-perfect reports using BI Publisher to cater to organizational reporting needs. Set up agents and workflows to provide actionable insights and improve decision-making processes. Author(s) The authors, None Ward and None Khan, are seasoned experts in Oracle Business Intelligence with years of experience implementing and managing OBIEE systems across various industries. Their approach combines succinct practical tutorials with insights gained from real-world projects, making technical concepts accessible and actionable. Who is it for? This book is perfect for IT consultants, data scientists, project managers, and business analysts involved in data-driven decision-making. Beginners to OBIEE but with a basic understanding of databases will find this guide invaluable for starting their BI journey. Professionals already familiar with other BI tools can also benefit from a detailed exploration of OBIEE's features.

Master the art of business intelligence in just a few steps with this hands-on guide. By following the detailed examples and techniques in this book, you'll learn to create effective BI solutions that analyze data for strategic decision-making. You'll explore tools like D3.js, R, Tableau, QlikView, and Python to visualize data and gain actionable insights. What this Book will help me do Develop the ability to create self-service reporting environments for business analytics. Understand and apply SQL techniques to aggregate and manipulate data effectively. Design and implement data models suitable for analytical and reporting purposes. Connect data warehouses with advanced BI tools to streamline reporting processes. Analyze and visualize data using industry-leading tools like D3.js, R, Tableau, and Python. Author(s) Written by seasoned experts in data analytics and business intelligence, the authors bring years of industry experience and practical insights to this well-rounded guide. They specialize in turning complex data into manageable, insightful BI solutions. Their writing style is approachable yet detailed, ensuring you gain both foundational and advanced knowledge in a structured way. Who is it for? This book caters to data enthusiasts and professionals in roles such as data analysis, BI development, or data management. It's perfect for beginners seeking practical BI skills, as well as experienced developers looking to integrate and implement sophisticated BI tools. The focus is on actionable insights, making it ideal for anyone aiming to leverage data for business growth.

Aligning your business intelligence (BI) infrastructure with your strategy process can help to enhance your organization's responsiveness to changing environments and create added value for investments in BI infrastructure and development. This book explains how to use business intelligence to improve your analysis activities and provides a framework for developing data models and solutions that fit your organization's strategy. Offering the concepts, tools, and background required for success, the book details the infrastructure required for carrying out successful business intelligence activities.

Business Intelligence Strategy and Big Data Analytics is written for business leaders, managers, and analysts - people who are involved with advancing the use of BI at their companies or who need to better understand what BI is and how it can be used to improve profitability. It is written from a general management perspective, and it draws on observations at 12 companies whose annual revenues range between $500 million and $20 billion. Over the past 15 years, my company has formulated vendor-neutral business-focused BI strategies and program execution plans in collaboration with manufacturers, distributors, retailers, logistics companies, insurers, investment companies, credit unions, and utilities, among others. It is through these experiences that we have validated business-driven BI strategy formulation methods and identified common enterprise BI program execution challenges. In recent years, terms like “big data” and “big data analytics” have been introduced into the business and technical lexicon. Upon close examination, the newer terminology is about the same thing that BI has always been about: analyzing the vast amounts of data that companies generate and/or purchase in the course of business as a means of improving profitability and competitiveness. Accordingly, we will use the terms BI and business intelligence throughout the book, and we will discuss the newer concepts like big data as appropriate. More broadly, the goal of this book is to share methods and observations that will help companies achieve BI success and thereby increase revenues, reduce costs, or both. Provides ideas for improving the business performance of one’s company or business functions Emphasizes proven, practical, step-by-step methods that readers can readily apply in their companies Includes exercises and case studies with road-tested advice about formulating BI strategies and program plans

This comprehensive and authoritative guide will teach you the DAX language for business intelligence, data modeling, and analytics. Leading Microsoft BI consultants Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari help you master everything from table functions through advanced code and model optimization. You’ll learn exactly what happens under the hood when you run a DAX expression, how DAX behaves differently from other languages, and how to use this knowledge to write fast, robust code. If you want to leverage all of DAX’s remarkable power and flexibility, this no-compromise “deep dive” is exactly what you need. Perform powerful data analysis with DAX for Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services, Excel, and Power BI Master core DAX concepts, including calculated columns, measures, and error handling Understand evaluation contexts and the CALCULATE and CALCULATETABLE functions Perform time-based calculations: YTD, MTD, previous year, working days, and more Work with expanded tables, complex functions, and elaborate DAX expressions Perform calculations over hierarchies, including parent/child hierarchies Use DAX to express diverse and unusual relationships Measure DAX query performance with SQL Server Profiler and DAX Studio

Leverage the integration of SQL Server and Office for more effective BI Applied Microsoft Business Intelligence shows you how to leverage the complete set of Microsoft tools—including Microsoft Office and SQL Server—to better analyze business data. This book provides best practices for building complete BI solutions using the full Microsoft toolset. You will learn how to effectively use SQL Server Analysis and Reporting Services, along with Excel, SharePoint, and other tools to provide effective and cohesive solutions for the enterprise. Coverage includes BI architecture, data queries, semantic models, multidimensional modeling, data analysis and visualization, performance monitoring, data mining, and more, to help you learn to perform practical business analysis and reporting. Written by an author team that includes a key member of the BI product team at Microsoft, this useful reference provides expert instruction for more effective use of the Microsoft BI toolset. Use Microsoft BI suite cohesively for more effective enterprise solutions Search, analyze, and visualize data more efficiently and completely Develop flexible and scalable tabular and multidimensional models Monitor performance, build a BI portal, and deploy and manage the BI Solution

Business Intelligence with SQL Server Reporting Services helps you deliver business intelligence with panache. Harness the power of the Reporting Services toolkit to combine charts, gauges, sparklines, indicators, and maps into compelling dashboards and scorecards. Create compelling visualizations that seize your audience’s attention and help business users identify and react swiftly to changing business conditions. Best of all, you'll do all these things by creating new value from software that is already installed and paid for – SQL Server and the included SQL Server Reporting Services. Businesses run on numbers, and good business intelligence systems make the critical numbers immediately and conveniently accessible. Business users want access to key performance indicators in the office, at the beach, and while riding the subway home after a day's work. Business Intelligence with SQL Server Reporting Services helps you meet these need for anywhere/anytime access by including chapters specifically showing how to deliver on modern devices such as smart phones and tablets. You'll learn to deliver the same information, with similar look-and-feel, across the entire range of devices used in business today. Key performance indicators give fast notification of business unit performance Polished dashboards deliver essential metrics and strategic comparisons Visually arresting output on multiple devices focuses attention

“This book is a splendid and valuable addition to this subject. The whole book is well written and I have no hesitation to recommend that this can be adapted as a textbook for graduate courses in Business Intelligence and Data Mining.” Dr. Edi Shivaji, Des Moines, Iowa “As a complete novice to this area just starting out on a MBA course I found the book incredibly useful and very easy to follow and understand. The concepts are clearly explained and make it an easy task to gain an understanding of the subject matter.” -- Mr. Craig Domoney, South Africa. Business Intelligence and Data Mining is a conversational and informative book in the exploding area of Business Analytics. Using this book, one can easily gain the intuition about the area, along with a solid toolset of major data mining techniques and platforms. This book can thus be gainfully used as a textbook for a college course. It is also short and accessible enough for a busy executive to become a quasi-expert in this area in a couple of hours. Every chapter begins with a case-let from the real world, and ends with a case study that runs across the chapters.

Corporations and governmental agencies of all sizes are embracing a new generation of enterprise-scale business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing (DW), and very often appoint a single senior-level individual to serve as the Enterprise BI/DW Program Manager. This book is the essential guide to the incremental and iterative build-out of a successful enterprise-scale BI/DW program comprised of multiple underlying projects, and what the Enterprise Program Manager must successfully accomplish to orchestrate the many moving parts in the quest for true enterprise-scale business intelligence and data warehousing. Author Alan Simon has served as an enterprise business intelligence and data warehousing program management advisor to many of his clients, and spent an entire year with a single client as the adjunct consulting director for a $10 million enterprise data warehousing (EDW) initiative. He brings a wealth of knowledge about best practices, risk management, organizational culture alignment, and other Critical Success Factors (CSFs) to the discipline of enterprise-scale business intelligence and data warehousing.

I highly recommend that you look at your organization through the lens of The Four Intelligences of the Business Mind. If you do so, your business will improve in unexpected ways." —Mark Waldman, Executive MBA Faculty, Loyola Marymount University "A new pragmatic synthesis of organizational psychology, business analytics, and multiple intelligences theory, The Four Intelligences of the Business Mind uses a revolutionary four-quadrant-based approach to teach you how to retrain your brain to optimize and transform your business. Valeh Nazemoff has written an excellent book with a commonsense approach and clear guidance." —Shaun Khalfan, Chief of Cyber Infrastructure, Department of the Navy The Four Intelligences of the Business Mind lays out a scheme of four discrete but interlocking types of intelligence essential to business success. These intelligences are scalable and transferable from the individual leader to the organizational ecosystem. This short book teaches executives first to analyze and train their own brains in these four intelligences; then to transform their organizations by applying their sharpened quadruplex intelligence to their business analyses and decisions; and finally to train and incentivize their companies to map onto a collective organizational scale the mental transformation modeled by the "mastermind" leader. The four essential business intelligences identified by IT executive and organizational psychologist Valeh Nazemoff are financial intelligence, customer intelligence, data intelligence, and mastermind intelligence. Financial intelligence informs your ability to reinvest and regrow your business boldly but prudently in the light of predictive, risk, and business analytics. Customer intelligence informs your ability to rethink your approaches to attracting and keeping customers using customer, web, mobile, social, big data, and behavioral analytics. Data intelligence informs your ability to reinvent and recreate information in automated graphical representations to enable rapid decision-making using visual, cloud, web, and operational analytics, AI, and distance collaboration platforms. Finally, mastermind intelligence involves your ability through leadership and team exercises to impart to your employees and organization the same transformative honing and integration of business intelligences as you have undergone yourself. "Practical, relevant, insightful, engaging, and a pleasant read, The Four Intelligences of the Business Mind puts human decision making into a whole new light, revealing practical steps that will allow you to reinvent your business and customer relationships!" —James Brady, PhD, FHIMSS, Chief Information Officer, Kaiser Permanente Orange County "An invaluable book that shows you how to harness the inevitable transformations in business by understanding your mind better." —Alan Komet, Vice President, Global Sales Operations, FalconStor Software, Inc. "A must-read book for every business person." —Chuck Corjay, Ret. Chairman, AFCEA International "Valeh Nazemoff has written an intelligent, thoughtful book full of insight and practical advice. The Four Intelligences of the Business Mind reframes the way our minds work, and in doing so transforms how we drive business forward. This book is a must-read!" —Joe DiStefano, Senior Vice President and Market Executive, Cardinal Bank

Between the high-level concepts of business intelligence and the nitty-gritty instructions for using vendors’ tools lies the essential, yet poorly-understood layer of architecture, design and process. Without this knowledge, Big Data is belittled – projects flounder, are late and go over budget. Business Intelligence Guidebook: From Data Integration to Analytics shines a bright light on an often neglected topic, arming you with the knowledge you need to design rock-solid business intelligence and data integration processes. Practicing consultant and adjunct BI professor Rick Sherman takes the guesswork out of creating systems that are cost-effective, reusable and essential for transforming raw data into valuable information for business decision-makers. After reading this book, you will be able to design the overall architecture for functioning business intelligence systems with the supporting data warehousing and data-integration applications. You will have the information you need to get a project launched, developed, managed and delivered on time and on budget – turning the deluge of data into actionable information that fuels business knowledge. Finally, you’ll give your career a boost by demonstrating an essential knowledge that puts corporate BI projects on a fast-track to success. Provides practical guidelines for building successful BI, DW and data integration solutions. Explains underlying BI, DW and data integration design, architecture and processes in clear, accessible language. Includes the complete project development lifecycle that can be applied at large enterprises as well as at small to medium-sized businesses Describes best practices and pragmatic approaches so readers can put them into action. Companion website includes templates and examples, further discussion of key topics, instructor materials, and references to trusted industry sources.

Nearly every large corporation and governmental agency is taking a fresh look at their current enterprise-scale business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing implementations at the dawn of the "Big Data Era"…and most see a critical need to revitalize their current capabilities. Whether they find the frustrating and business-impeding continuation of a long-standing "silos of data" problem, or an over-reliance on static production reports at the expense of predictive analytics and other true business intelligence capabilities, or a lack of progress in achieving the long-sought-after enterprise-wide "single version of the truth" – or all of the above – IT Directors, strategists, and architects find that they need to go back to the drawing board and produce a brand new BI/data warehousing roadmap to help move their enterprises from their current state to one where the promises of emerging technologies and a generation’s worth of best practices can finally deliver high-impact, architecturally evolvable enterprise-scale business intelligence and data warehousing. Author Alan Simon, whose BI and data warehousing experience dates back to the late 1970s and who has personally delivered or led more than thirty enterprise-wide BI/data warehousing roadmap engagements since the mid-1990s, details a comprehensive step-by-step approach to building a best practices-driven, multi-year roadmap in the quest for architecturally evolvable BI and data warehousing at the enterprise scale. Simon addresses the triad of technology, work processes, and organizational/human factors considerations in a manner that blends the visionary and the pragmatic. Takes a fresh look at true enterprise-scale BI/DW in the "Dawn of the Big Data Era" Details a checklist-based approach to surveying one’s current state and identifying which components are enterprise-ready and which ones are impeding the key objectives of enterprise-scale BI/DW Provides an approach for how to analyze and test-bed emerging technologies and architectures and then figure out how to include the relevant ones in the roadmaps that will be developed Presents a tried-and-true methodology for building a phased, incremental, and iterative enterprise BI/DW roadmap that is closely aligned with an organization’s business imperatives, organizational culture, and other considerations

Bridge the big data gap with Microsoft Business Intelligence Tools for Excel Analysts The distinction between departmental reporting done by business analysts with Excel and the enterprise reporting done by IT departments with SQL Server and SharePoint tools is more blurry now than ever before. With the introduction of robust new features like PowerPivot and Power View, it is essential for business analysts to get up to speed with big data tools that in the past have been reserved for IT professionals. Written by a team of Business Intelligence experts, Microsoft Business Intelligence Tools for Excel Analysts introduces business analysts to the rich toolset and reporting capabilities that can be leveraged to more effectively source and incorporate large datasets in their analytics while saving them time and simplifying the reporting process. Walks you step-by-step through important BI tools like PowerPivot, SQL Server, and SharePoint and shows you how to move data back and forth between these tools and Excel Shows you how to leverage relational databases, slice data into various views to gain different visibility perspectives, create eye-catching visualizations and dashboards, automate SQL Server data retrieval and integration, and publish dashboards and reports to the web Details how you can use SQL Server's built-in functions to analyze large amounts of data, Excel pivot tables to access and report OLAP data, and PowerPivot to create powerful reporting mechanisms You'll get on top of the Microsoft BI stack and all it can do to enhance Excel data analysis with this one-of-a-kind guide written for Excel analysts just like you.

Revised to cover new advances in business intelligence—big data, cloud, mobile, and more—this fully updated bestseller reveals the latest techniques to exploit BI for the highest ROI. “Cindi has created, with her typical attention to details that matter, a contemporary forward-looking guide that organizations could use to evaluate existing or create a foundation for evolving business intelligence / analytics programs. The book touches on strategy, value, people, process, and technology, all of which must be considered for program success. Among other topics, the data, data warehousing, and ROI comments were spot on. The ‘technobabble’ chapter was brilliant!” — Bill Frank, Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing Program Manager, Johnson & Johnson “If you want to be an analytical competitor, you’ve got to go well beyond business intelligence technology. Cindi Howson has wrapped up the needed advice on technology, organization, strategy, and even culture in a neat package. It’s required reading for quantitatively oriented strategists and the technologists who support them.” — Thomas H. Davenport, President’s Distinguished Professor, Babson College and co-author, Competing on Analytics “Cindi has created an exceptional, authoritative description of the end-to-end business intelligence ecosystem. This is a great read for those who are just trying to better understand the business intelligence space, as well as for the seasoned BI practitioner.” — Sully McConnell, Vice President, Business Intelligence and Information Management, Time Warner Cable “Cindi’s book succinctly yet completely lays out what it takes to deliver BI successfully. IT and business leaders will benefit from Cindi’s deep BI experience, which she shares through helpful, real-world definitions, frameworks, examples, and stories. This is a must-read for companies engaged in – or considering – BI.” — Barbara Wixom, PhD, Principal Research Scientist, MIT Sloan Center for Information Systems Research Expanded to cover the latest advances in business intelligence such as big data, cloud, mobile, visual data discovery, and in-memory computing, this fully updated bestseller by BI guru Cindi Howson provides cutting-edge techniques to exploit BI for maximum value. Successful Business Intelligence: Unlock the Value of BI & Big Data, Second Edition describes best practices for an effective BI strategy. Find out how to: Garner executive support to foster an analytic culture Align the BI strategy with business goals Develop an analytic ecosystem to exploit data warehousing, analytic appliances, and Hadoop for the right BI workload Continuously improve the quality, breadth, and timeliness of data Find the relevance of BI for everyone in the company Use agile development processes to deliver BI capabilities and improvements at the pace of business change Select the right BI tools to meet user and business needs Measure success in multiple ways Embrace innovation, promote successes and applications, and invest in training Monitor your evolution and maturity across various factors for impact Exclusive industry survey data and real-world case studies from Medtronic, Macy’s, 1-800 CONTACTS, The Dow Chemical Company, Netflix, Constant Contact, and other companies show successful BI initiatives in action. From Moneyball to Nate Silver, BI and big data have permeated our cultural, political, and economic landscape. This timely, up-to-date guide reveals how to plan and deploy an agile, state-of-the-art BI solution that links insight to action and delivers a sustained competitive advantage.