One author says the current subprime mortgage meltdown might have been avoided if large financial players had been more collaborative.

By Chris Smith

Regardless of the hardship it is causing many people, the subprime mortgage meltdown may have a silver lining by indirectly stimulating innovation in the years ahead.

IBM's growing interest in Africa and the world's other poorer regions is rooted in several philosophies, including social responsibility, but one of those philosophies is simply economic self-interest.

Sophisticated DB2 for i5/OS features provide important benefits within the business intelligence environment.

In the first part of this two-part series, we covered business intelligence concepts, architecture, and methodology—ideas that embody data warehousing, data marts, querying, and reporting. In this part, we will review a number of sophisticated DB2 for i5/OS features that provide important benefits within the business intelligence environment.

Having a practical knowledge of BI can give your organization a distinct competitive edge.

Business intelligence (BI) is rapidly regaining the attention of business executives because a well-designed and well-implemented data warehousing system can truly provide the organization with a competitive edge. This two-part article will help you understand how to build a robust business intelligence solution on System i. In the first part, we will discuss business intelligence concepts, architecture, and methodology—ideas that embody data warehousing, data marts, queries, and reporting. In the second part, we will review a number of sophisticated DB2 for i5/OS features that provide important benefits within the business intelligence environment.

We will highlight just one methodology, a methodology intended to build BI applications that do all these things:

Powerful, affordable technology is available to midsize firms, and the benefits are enormous.

Enterprises have always been organized around the fact that somebody knew something—market needs, technology capabilities, economic currents—and had the resources, intelligence, and intuition to analyze and act positively with or against those facts, or information. As enterprises have grown so have the volume and types of information, presenting both opportunities and obstacles in terms of its exploitation and its management.

In today's businesses, information assembly and storage is moving away from paper-glutted file cabinets in favor of increasingly powerful and flexible databases—electronic libraries that can be configured for virtually infinite capacity and easy, flexible search, access, and recovery. The challenge to an enterprise is to know its information's value; know how to gather, store, and maintain it; and then know how to exploit in a purposeful manner. All of this "knowing" comes together as "knowledge," and while this interpretation may fall short of some of the loftier descriptions of knowledge theorists, it applies well in midsize business organizations.

The key to any successful business intelligence or data warehousing solution is its ability to provide information to those who need it.

CEOs want a lot these days:

• Lower costs
• Improved customer and supplier satisfaction
• Better product quality
• Decreased time to market
• Business growth
• Enhanced competitive advantages
• And more!

The solutions they are examining most earnestly to achieve these goals fall under the umbrella called "business intelligence." An appropriate business intelligence solution transforms raw business data into meaningful information that can be used to make timely decisions to advance these goals. The business intelligence solution needs to work not only internally, but also externally, with outside partners that include customers, vendors, and other parties in the supply chain. The key to any successful business intelligence or data warehousing solution is its ability to provide information to those who need it.