Features

• In-memory computing

  By Brad Howarth | 20 January, 2011 09:33

  The massive explosion in data volumes collected by many organisations has brought with it an accompanying headache in terms of putting it to gainful use. Businesses increasingly need to make quick decisions, and pressure is mounting on IT departments to provide solutions that deliver quality data much faster than has been possible before. The days of trapping information in a data warehouse for retrospective analysis are fading in favour of event-driven systems that can provide data and enable decisions in real time.

• 5 open source BI projects to watch

  By Rodney Gedda | 07 December, 2010 16:03

  Business intelligence (BI) is frequently among the top prioroties for CIOs and finding the right software to do the job is always a challenge. Cloud-based software may be all the rage, but CIOs must still manage in-house information and make better use of it through analytics and reporting tools. The big four software companies have all made strategic investments in the BI space over recent years and the options have dimnished, but there are alternative tools popping up and snatching a lot of customers in the process. This installment of '5 open source things to watch' is all about BI that doesn't scar the annual report.

• Business intelligence evolution

  By Brad Howarth | 01 October, 2010 18:24

  Australian CIOs may be thankful this year’s flu season was relatively sparing on their employees, but many have themselves become the source of another form of infection within their business - the ever growing call for more robust business intelligence.

• Apocalypse: 52 percent of CIOs plan to blow up IT groups

  By Thomas Wailgum | 24 July, 2010 09:00

  The saying goes something like this: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." The statement is, of course, embraced as dogma by those fearful of change and by automobile owners praying for a reasonable bill of charge while waiting at the mechanic's garage.

• An IT department's crucial role in a new product launch

  By Kim S. Nash | 22 July, 2010 07:01

  In late 2008, Monsanto licensed a seed coating that helps corn, soybean and other seeds fight insects and disease during the tricky germination stage. By early 2009, company scientists had finished work on that cocktail of fungicides and insecticides, dubbed Acceleron, and the company wanted to get the coating to market in time for the 2010 planting season. "We were going after that opportunity very aggressively. If we don't hit season, that opportunity is another 12 months away," says CIO Shirley Cunningham.

• BI's Dirty Secret: Better Tools No Match for Bad Strategy

  By Thomas Wailgum | 02 February, 2010 06:45

  The pressure on CIOs to deliver business intelligence tools and analytic applications--on the cheap and ASAP--has been building steadily for years. In 2010, survey results point out that that demand has reached a fever pitch with which CIOs are very familiar.

• Mind Your Own Business Intelligence

  By Matt Rodgers | 19 November, 2009 05:41

  When I saw in IDC’s latest Forecast for Management Survey that business intelligence and security were no longer in the list of top 10 CIO priorities, I almost spilled my coffee. Have we learned nothing from the last 12 months?

• CIOs highlight BI, virtualisation and cloud computing as key to competitiveness

  By Rodney Gedda | 15 September, 2009 10:57

  An IBM survey of 2500 international and 129 local CIOs suggests business intelligence and centralisation of IT systems through virtualisation and cloud computing will be crucial to remaining competitive in the coming months.

• Large Data Set Analysis in the Cloud: Hadoop Gets a boost

  By Bernard Golden | 10 April, 2009 07:15

  The changing nature of IT, as well as the rapid evolution of business processes, means that you'll likely face the need for an analytical tool like Hadoop in the very near future.

• IT managers seeking new tools that can analyze Web 2.0 data

  By Heather Havenstein | 06 November, 2008 08:30

  Some IT leaders look to new offerings that analyze data from corporate blogs, social networks.

• How IT could have prevented the financial meltdown

  By Ephraim Schwartz | 25 September, 2008 09:05

  In the coming weeks the feds and the surviving financial services institutions will have the daunting task of unraveling all the securitized loans and other instruments that are hiding the toxic investments. But does the technology exist to do that? And if so, could it have been used to prevent the bad debt from hitting the fan in the first place?

• Building a new window into crime

  By Heather Havenstein | 12 September, 2008 10:18

  By combining business intelligence and two foundations of Web 2.0 -- search and mapping -- a police department in the US state of Kentucky has built a brand-new window into crime. This Web-based BI portal allows patrol officers to enter data -- or even pieces of data such as a few numbers from a license plate -- into a simple search interface and retrieve information from their own databases and those of neighboring towns.