business intelligence (BI) - News, Features, and Slideshows

There has been a reverse in the interest of CEOs in IT projects that save the business money to initiatives that make money, Harvey Nash’s latest CIO survey has revealed.

Tableau will showcase beta version 9.0 of its data visualization and analysis software to a large group of customers today, touting features that include drag-and-drop analytics as well as data-preparation features that formerly had to be done outside the application.

IBM Watson, apparently not content with its Jeopardy winnings, is looking for work. After a lot of buildup, Watson Analytics, the natural language business intelligence tool based on Big Blue's famed AI, is now available in beta under a freemium model where it's free to get started -- but the really powerful analytics are going to cost you.

The 2014 national iAward finalists and WAiTTA winners for Western Australia, along with ACT iAward winners, were announced last week. The state iAwards recognised a wide variety of technologies, ranging from Rio Tinto’s 4G LTE network to National Blood Authority’s treatment management app.

Dodo has adjusted marketing and its range of energy and telecom services over the last three years based on insights learned from a business intelligence (BI) platform, according to M2 Telecommunications consumer director, Boris Rozenvasser.

According to Gartner, business Intelligence and analytics will remain a top focus for CIOs through 2017, with companies spending millions on traditional BI software, cloud BI services and now mobile apps and even social BI. However, as the type and number of BI solutions has grown, so too has the possibility of failure, of picking the wrong business intelligence software for your business problem or problems or of having end users not understand or properly use the solution.

This year's CIO 100 honorees collectively spent more than $502 million on their technology projects, and many of the winning efforts focus on using advanced analytics to create new sources of revenue, improve customer experience and increase competitive advantage.