New Web Site

My new web site is now up and running. Please visit http://www.bsmithsolutions.com. There you'll find "The Little Book of Business Intelligence," a compilation of articles from this blog in Adobe Acrobat format, plus a link to a little development project I'm working on.

I will no longer post to this blog, but will leave the content for the time being. See you on the new site!

Update: New Site Coming Soon

I've been sidetracked by some things lately, but haven't forgotten about this site. I'm preparing a new site to address a number of topics, including business intelligence. One of the first things on the new site will be a free pdf file repackaging the best articles on this blog, which I had previously promised. When I have it all together, you'll be the first to know..

Rethinking Hosted Blogs

After the Blogger outage that ended earlier today caused my most recent updates to the look and feel of the blog to be lost, I have to say I'm giving second thought to this whole hosted blog thing. Just a few days ago I was reading about Wordpress.com getting hacked and thinking "there but for the grace of God go I." Apparently, I spoke too soon.

A Quick Look At Microsoft Office 365 Beta

The following article was removed from the blog during the Blogger outage. I'm reposting it for the benefit of those who missed it previously.

I had the opportunity to sign up for the Microsoft Office 365 beta program over the weekend. This is "Office-in-the-cloud" with SharePoint thrown in for good measure. I was curious to see if Office 365 had anything to offer from a business intelligence standpoint, so I put it to the test. Warning: you may find this a little geekier than the business-professional-oriented content I normally post on this site.

Blog Updates

If you've been here before you'll note a change in the title. Having finished my "primer" posts I decided it was time to drop "primer" from the blog title. I plan to shift the focus of the blog toward small to medium businesses (SMB) and to post a bit more.than I have recently. I'll still try as much as possible to "take the mystery out" of the subject matter. Also, I intend to seek out opportunities to monetize the blog in a way that is consistent with the content and, hopefully, useful to you (no pizza ads if I can help it). Finally, I'm working on compiling the "primer" posts into an eBook which I'll make available for download. Stay tuned.

Business Intelligence Still A Problem For Small And Medium Firms

An InformationWeek article released earlier today (US EDT) highlighted the struggles that small and medium size businesses still face in attempting to implement business intelligence (BI). The article, which quoted a survey by BI vendor LogiXML, noted that nearly half of all non-technical users polled were dissatisfied with their BI implementations. The main hurdles are cost and lack of IT staff, cited by 27 and 26 percent of respondents respectively. The 575 respondent firms polled by LogiXML were predominantly small and medium in size.

An Idea Whose Time Has Come (Again)

A press release issued earlier this morning (US EDT) by Star Analytics touts the company's offering. Star Command Center 3.0. Star Command Center isn't really a business intelligence (BI) software package itself. Rather, it sits on top of other vendors' BI platforms, providing a single interface to all your enterprise's BI applications. (Enterprise? Star Command? Hmm . . .)