Business unIntelligence: Insight and Innovation beyond Analytics and Big Data

Business intelligence (BI) used to be so simple - in theory anyway. Integrate and copy data from your transactional systems into a specialized relational database, apply BI reporting and query tools and add business users. Job done.

No longer. Analytics, big data and an array of diverse technologies have changed everything. More importantly, business is insisting on ever more value, ever faster from information and from IT in general. An emerging biz-tech ecosystem demands that business and IT work together.

Business unIntelligence reflects the new reality that in today's socially complex and rapidly changing world, business decisions must be based on a combination of rational and intuitive thinking. Integrating cues from diverse information sources and tacit knowledge, decision makers create unique meaning to innovate heuristically at the speed of thought. This book provides a wealth of new models that business and IT can use together to design support systems for tomorrow's successful organizations.

Dr. Barry Devlin, one of the earliest proponents of data warehousing, goes back to basics to explore how the modern trinity of information, process and people must be reinvented and restructured to deliver the value, insight and innovation required by modern businesses. From here, he develops a series of novel architectural models that provide a new foundation for holistic information use across the entire business. From discovery to analysis and from decision making to action taking, he defines a fully integrated, closed-loop business environment. Covering every aspect of business analytics, big data, collaborative working and more, this book takes over where BI ends to deliver the definitive framework for information use in the coming years.

As the person who defined the conceptual framework and physical architecture for data warehousing in the 1980s, Barry Devlin has been an astute observer of the movement he initiated ever since. Now, in Business unintelligence, Devlin provides a sweeping view of the past, present, and future of business intelligence, while delivering new conceptual and physical models for how to turn information into insights and action. Reading Devlin's prose and vision of BI are comparable to reading Carl Sagan's view of the cosmos. The book is truly illuminating and inspiring.
--Wayne Eckerson, President, BI Leader Consulting
Author, "Secrets of Analytical Leaders: Insights from Information Insiders"

Dr. Barry Devlin is among the foremost authorities on business insight and big data, and one of the founders of data warehousing, having published the first architectural paper on the topic in 1988. With over 30 years of IT experience, including 20 years with IBM as a Distinguished Engineer, he is a widely respected analyst, consultant, and lecturer. He is author of the seminal book, "Data Warehouse-from Architecture to Implementation" and numerous White Papers. Barry is founder and principal of 9sight Consulting. He specializes in the human, organizational and IT implications of deep business insight solutions that combine operational, informational and collaborative environments. A regular tweeter, blogger and contributor to multiple publications, Barry is based in Cape Town, South Africa and operates worldwide.