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As part of our commitment to exceptional customer service, we provide quarterly webinars that offer timely insights about industry trends and recent product evaluations. If you have ever been a customer – whether current subscriber, consulting client, or individual report purchaser – you will be invited to these webinars. Subscribers can access the events on demand.

Evaluating Advanced Visualization and Discovery Tools

Should advanced visualization tools be part of your BI tool portfolio? This webinar highlights key differences among leading visualization products such as Tableau and TIBCO Spotfire, and discovery tools such as QlikTech QlikView and SAP BusinessObjects Explorer. An evaluation framework is provided along with mini demonstrations. We also share key findings from recent product evaluations including IBM Cognos 8.4 Go! Dashboards and Information Builders InfoAssist 7.6.9.

BI Pricing and Evaluation Update

No two vendors package their products the same, making it difficult for buyers to compare competitive quotes. This webinar highlights different ways vendors package their software, sample pricing scenarios, and gotchas in negotiating your BI license agreement. We also share key findings from recent product evaluations including SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1 and Information Builders WebFOCUS InfoAssist.

Build a Better BI Tool Strategy

While BI vendors are starting to sound the same, their tools are quite different in their appeal and capabilities. Gain insight from the BIScorecard summary scorecards on vendor strategic issues and product capabilities. Discover how to navigate the BIScorecard website to ensure you stay abreast of industry trends and product enhancements. Learn techniques for developing a better BI tool strategy.

Complimentary

Dashboards and Visual Discovery Tools: an Evaluation Framework

Dashboards and visual discovery are now must-have components of the BI tool portfolio. What’s driving their popularity? Capabilities vary widely among BI platform vendors and specialty solutions. This webinar highlights key evaluation criteria, industry trends, and differences in leading products.

Mobile BI

Today’s decision-makers need information on the go. Today’s businesses need to support those workers (as well as customers and partners) on any mobile device. Mobile business intelligence should be platform agnostic, run on any device, and provide the same interactivity you expect on a desktop computer - so you can build once and deploy everywhere.

Business Analytics

Businesses need a forward-looking view of their operations to support customer satisfaction as well as revenue, cost, and risk management goals. Business analytics provides this insight and also allows organizations to automatically leverage vast volumes of data.

Social Networking Meets Business Intelligence

Facebook recently reached over 750 million users, a community now greater than the population of North America. Twitter has helped topple regimes in the Middle East. With social networking tools having such far reaching impact, the influence on business intelligence promises to be equally revolutionary. Or does it? This webinar highlights industry trends on how social media is impacting the BI space, from changing users'expectations, expanding data sources to analyze, to bringing new features such as discussions, ratings, and communities. And we'll look at how companies are looking to leverage the data from networks like Facebook to create an update, powerful CRM tool.

Best Practices for Successful Business Intelligence: 2011 Insights

This webinar provides an update on BI adoption, business impact, and best practices from both organizational and technical perspectives. Key technical issues include near-real time data warehouse updates, master data management, and BI standardization. Key organizational issues include enterprise versus departmental BI and the business-IT partnership. This webinar is based on updated 2011 survey results and case studies.

Cool BI: 2011’s Emerging Innovations

The business intelligence tools market continues to bring innovations that have made BI more engaging, insightful, to an increasingly broad spectrum of users. Some of these innovations may be just cool bells and whistles. Others provide lasting value and those who adopt early may have first-mover competitive advantage. This webinar gives you a framework for evaluating innovations, separating the hype from the reality and helping you prioritize the innovations you should most adopt. Cindi Howson provides an overview of the top eight innovations with a focus on mobile BI, the simplicity of search, and social networking’s convergence with BI.

Briefing Room with MicroStrategy: Visual and Mobile BI

With everyone on the go these days, the value of Business Intelligence (BI) must extend far beyond the corporate firewall. That includes the power of analytics, until recently only available to the select few analysts and executives who had access. Now that mobile devices are pervasive, and visual analysis is much more accessible, business people everywhere have a whole new range of possibilities at their fingertips. Still, this new world of options will require some retraining and rethinking. Listen in to veteran BI Analyst Cindi Howson of BI Scorecard explain how your organization can take advantage of this new wave in analytical capability.

Promoting your BI Application to Improve Adoption

You’ve built it. Will they come? Probably not, because they don’t even know what ‘it’ is - BI that is! Making BI pervasive and a strategic resource to the business requires the BI team to take a more proactive, marketing approach to promoting business intelligence. This webinar reviews the marketing concepts that will help you build awareness for your BI efforts, foster a closer partnership between the business and IT, and boost BI usage. The presentation covers: learning to speak BI in business terms versus techno babble, the elevator pitch and promotional techniques that measurably increase adoption.

Failures and Fixes for Self-Service BI

Ad hoc query tools promise to empower users and provide self-service access, removing IT as a bottleneck to report development. However, ad hoc query tools can sometimes lead to greater data chaos as the number of reports and questionable queries explodes. This webcast highlights the vision for self-service BI, best practices in deploying these types of tools, and pitfalls to avoid. You will learn the value and benefits of ad hoc query tools, the role of search and interactive reports, where deployments fail, and the best practices for greater empowerment and less report chaos.

From Strategy to Execution: Scorecards and BI

With so many variables to consider, decision-makers scramble to keep up with day-to-day business fluctuations. Instead of just unleashing more and more data on them, your business intelligence (BI) solution should be focused on relevant trends and your most important business goals. This webinar covers the basics of must-have tools in your BI portfolio and reviews best practices for getting started. Then we'll dive into practical how-tos.

Rapid-Fire Analytics: Fusing In-Memory with Advanced Visualization

The long-sought dream of rapid-fire analytics remains elusive, but recent advances in technology and integration have changed the game. The combination of in-memory database technology with drag-and-drop data visualization opens the door to “speed-of-thought” business analysis. The nexus of these technologies empowers savvy business people with the analytical playground they’ve wanted for decades. Of course, nothing is ever that easy, but the on-ramp to valuable analysis sure looks smoother today than ever before. Topics discussed include the data engine, combination charts, page trails and other components that strike Cindi Howson's interest.

Why 2011 is the Year to Stop Having Data Everywhere and Information Nowhere

Everyone recognizes that the landscape of business has changed, and the information era has arrived. As a result, many companies are seeing that traditional BI is unable to support the new needs of business. Over the past couple years, terms such has “Self-Service BI” and “Agile BI” and “Data Discovery” have been cropping up, indicating a new set of tools has arrived to address these needs.

Top 5 Challenges and Ways to Succeed with Self-Service BI

Ad hoc query tools promise to empower users and provide self-service access, removing IT as a bottleneck to report development. However, ad hoc query tools can sometimes lead to greater data chaos as the number of reports and questionable queries explodes. This webinar highlights the vision for self-service BI, best practices in deploying these types of tools, and pitfalls to avoid.

BI as a Competitive Differentiator

Hear Cindi’s answers to the questions: Is better business intelligence actually generating better corporate performance? Does every employee in every line of business need BI tools? Has the vision for business intelligence gotten ahead of the reality?

Agile BI At the Speed of Business

Business intelligence has to adapt to the speed of business with timely access to data to make better decisions and discover new opportunities. And yet, too often, BI projects take many months or even years to deliver value. A traditional BI project will use a waterfall approach to development as a way of defining precise requirements. Today’s business intelligence, meanwhile, demands speed and flexibility...