Learn how to tackle the challenges of poor data quality, inconsistency of business terms, fragmented view of the customer and product, and security and privacy.

Written by Sunil Soares

Editor's note: This article is an excerpt from the book Selling Information Governance to the Business: Best Practices by Industry and Job Function, published by MC Press.

According to the IBM 2009 Global CIO Study, today's CIOs spend an impressive 55 percent of their time on activities that spur innovation. These activities include generating buy-in for innovative plans, implementing new technologies, and managing nontechnological business issues. CIOs spend the remaining 45 percent of their time on essential, more traditional tasks related to managing the ongoing technology environment. This includes reducing IT costs, mitigating enterprise risks, and leveraging automation to lower costs elsewhere in the business.

Customers waiting for a solution from IBM to support their PHP applications running on IBM i can breathe a sigh of relief.

Written by Chris Smith

Most of the estimated 1,000 PHP developers at ZendCon this year were excited about Zend Technologies' new cloud platform (PaaS)—www.phpcloud.com—that allows developers to collaboratively develop and then host applications online from a choice of hosting platforms. Who needs a server when you have the cloud?

NGS-IQ is New Generation Software's flagship query, reporting, and business intelligence suite for companies that need to move beyond Query/400 and other IBM i query tools.

Written by New Generation Software, Inc.

NGS-IQ is an integrated suite of business intelligence, Web modernization, enterprise reporting and analytical solutions for IBM i on Power Systems. It provides powerful query development for both IT professionals and power users with their choice of Windows, Web, and 5250 environments. Custom Web pages and reporting portals can also be designed with the drag-and-drop, point-and-click Windows interface. 

Vendors have so many different types of products to offer. How do you sort through it all?

Written by Alan Jordan

It's easy to get confused when investigating the requirements and options for implementing a successful business intelligence (BI) initiative. There's an amazing array of product offerings from different vendors, each with its own unique mix of functionality, strengths, and weaknesses. If you are new to BI, it can be difficult to sort through these offerings and identify what is best for your organization.

Empower users so they can get the data they want to see.

Written by Floyd Del Muro

How do you deliver the information your users need to do their jobs? Can they answer business questions quickly and correctly? Are they empowered with the tools and knowledge they need to find and access the data spread out across your enterprise?

Sadly, for many the answer is, "No, not easily" or "No, not at all."

Faster! Faster! Everybody wants their apps and reports to run faster!

Written by Kent Milligan

All of you have users and bosses who regularly ask if it's possible to make applications and reports run faster on your IBM i. Usually, these applications and reports spend a significant amount of time processing data stored in your DB2 for i databases. This article contains seven DB2 for i performance-tuning tips for speeding up the applications and reports running on your IBM i systems.

Would you like to effortlessly replicate data from DB2 databases into Oracle, Informix, and Microsoft SQL databases and back again without custom programming or large-scale integration costs?

Written by Vision Solutions

Editor's Note: This article is an extract of the white paper "Real-time Database Sharing: What Can It Do for Your Business?" available free from the MC White Paper Center.

Senior managers expect IT teams to deliver consistent, high-quality data that creates a single view across the business. But with data stored across multiple databases and platforms, where does this single view reside? Attempting to combine all data into one "logical" database presents major data formatting, transformation, and consistency challenges.

How do you leverage business information for on-the-spot analysis?

Written by Floyd Del Muro

Need to provide critical business data to executives, managers, and business analysts, but find that the amount of training and supervision required is preventing you from providing a hands-on reporting tool for the business community? Is the thought of another software product to support across the entire network of users just too grand a plan with your limited staff? Need a fully functional, data?retrieving user interface that is as familiar and as easy to use as the Web? Do you have people that need to access data on the road for critical accounts and decisions?