Steve Mills, IBM Senior VP, has issued an internal memo announcing a significant split of the software group into a solutions and a middleware division. The shake up includes some very senior executives as well.

I just watched a cute video by Nic Smith on the history of Business Intelligence. Granted it was a shill for Microsoft but still it was cute and mostly accurate. However, there was one erroneous attribute that I think most people may not know. The term, "Business Intelligence" was not coined by Howard Dresner as stated in the video -- he did a fine job of making it popular but he did not invent the term. Read on to find out where it was first used...

For my entire career in BI and data warehousing (going on more than 20 years now), I have heard the expression -- BI should be "easy to use". I suggest that it is time for BI's tag line to change to "easy to consume". Here's why.

OK -- I have had a whole weekend to simmer down about John Thain, former CEO of Merrill Lynch, and his behavior. But it just kept getting worse and this morning, I have just had enough.

We decorated our Christmas tree last weekend -- and I realized that the decorations were snapshots of our family history -- basically our personal data warehouse. Certainly our tree will never make it into Good Housekeeping or win a prize for best decorations -- you could say it was "eclectic" to be kind -- but it is filled with many, many lovely memories...

Must be nice to wanted -- at least Mark Papermaster must be feeling the -- um -- love from his former and current employers. A federal judge ordered the former IBM executive recently hired by Apple to stop working for that company. I guess the big question remains... WHY?

I attended a breakfast forum this morning sponsored be Vista Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm here in Boulder, CO. The speaker was Ike Nassi, EVP for SAP Research. During his talk, Ike discussed "Green IT". He kicked off a whole series of thoughts in my head about how we can use BI to reduce our carbon footprints. So here goes:

Yep -- it's true. I took the summer off from blogging but now I'm baaaack! And what a time to come back. Dow down 777 points today. Banks and other financial institutions going under right and left. And the one area where there is huge growth turns out to be in the online fraud business. And sadly, these online fraud perpetrators are turning to software as a service (SaaS) to commit their fraud. What is the world coming to?

Read on to see how SaaS is being used to commit acts of fraud.

Operational BI is becoming quite the buzz today. There are countless articles, tips, vendors with operational BI offerings, case studies, etc., available today. Yet, I still get asked the very basic question of how do you get started. What are the first steps? Well, here are my thoughts on how to get started...

If you are struggling to define your company's key performance indicators (KPIs), here is a useful bit of information. I recently discovered an interesting website dedicated to identifying KPIs for just about every category you can think of. And it is FREE!