By Gene Cobb

If you have been following recent IT industry trends, you may have noticed that there has been a lot of activity in the area of Business Intelligence (BI). Mergers, major acquisitions, and announcements have dominated the headlines in the past year. IBM has been quite active in this area as well. The recent acquisition of Cognos and the announcement of the Dynamic Data Warehouse Initiative are evidence of this. But IBM's i5/OS investment in and commitment to BI has not just been recent; it has been a point of emphasis in the last several releases, going back to V4R1. Consider some of the following database enhancements that have been built into the operating system over the last decade and beyond:

Learn from the expert!
Dr. Frank Soltis, the father of the IBM AS/400 platform, demonstrates little known tips for seeking out, correcting and preventing system performance and capacity issues. In addition, you'll learn about currently available technology that automatically optimizes your system. Watch this On-Demand webcast NOW!

A variety of forces are combining to make implementing a paperless environment one of the most productive efforts IT can undertake today.

Written by Dan Forster

Editor's Note: This article is excerpted from the white paper "Best Practices: The Fundamentals of Document Automation," which is available free from the MC Press White Paper Center.

The rapid rise of document automation should come as no surprise. It is a technology that thrives in eras of growth, change, and new approaches to things. That would certainly describe the United States' economy today. With pressures on the IT function to cut costs and improve productivity, applications like document automation are a quick and relatively easy way to meet the demands of executive management to bolster the bottom line.