Chapter 2. Blazing a Trail through the Data Jungle
In This Chapter
Checking out the lifecycle of data in an information world
Understanding Microsoft Business Intelligence's role in the data lifecycle
Discovering why the right data are more valuable than a lot of data
Making use of the data glut generated by modern computer systems
The fewer data needed, the better the information. And an overload of information, that is, anything much beyond what is truly needed, leads to information blackout. It does not enrich, but impoverishes.
Imagine having the humanoid robot Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation as a consultant: A massive database that can sift through all the data ever known and turn it into information that the captain (okay, CEO) can use to make decisions . . . all in a human-friendly package. After he's spent a few days plugging in to all your computer systems and interviewing your people, you can ask him any question about your organization — and get a useful answer. The perfect business intelligence solution! Hopefully Microsoft is working on that. In the meantime, the present-day Microsoft BI capabilities can do almost as well.
These days, as never before, information is power. Hyper-competitive businesses live on the data that streams in from a complex tangle of people, systems, and processes. Before computers, armies of people needed weeks or months to compile business data — and more time to bash it into a usable format. In our modern world of computerized ...
Get Microsoft® Business Intelligence For Dummies® now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
