INFORMATION MANAGEMENT PROCESS OPTIMIZATION KNOWLEDGE CENTER ABOUT CSI

DMReview Magazine - What’s Hot in Business Intelligence: A Report From the BI Summit (William McKnight, 11/5/2007)
Consider how much master data management has crept into BI landscapes. Or the fact that we now look to apply BI opportunities operationally. How about the need to handle streaming, high-volume data, such as RFID data? Data warehouse appliances? In-depth reviews. Software as a service (SaaS)? Coming to BI - what’s the impact? And finally, data is so important that we need to govern it properly with high business involvement. These are burgeoning horizon opportunities as well as current needs addressed

iSixSigma - The Kano Analysis: Customer Needs Are Ever Changing (Jeff Stroud, 10/17/2007)
How does a company analyze customer needs? How can it easily determine what delights customers or what their basic needs are? A powerful technique to address these questions was developed by Noriaki Kano and colleagues. It is called Kano analysis.

DMReview Magazine - Healthcare Business Intelligence: The Time is (Still) Now (William McKnight, 10/15/2007)
Information exploitation could save health care from imploding. The underlying foundation of quality, integrated, well-performing and corporately adjudicated information is usually found by deploying best practices in the disciplines of data warehousing (DW), BI and master data management (MDM).

DMReview Magazine - The Four Pillars of RFID (William McKnight, 10/1/2007)
Information management is the solid foundation upon which RFID will fulfill or fail on its promise. Unprecedented data volumes will need to flow appropriately through the pillars of master data, operational BI, concentration and analytics. Only when RFID information management is sound can RFID data properly flow to real-time operational actions and downstream analytics and enable the true success businesses are seeking with RFID.

DMReview Magazine - Moving Business Intelligence to the Operational World, Part 2 of 2 (William McKnight, 9/1/2007)
As businesses evolve, so does BI. It is high volume and real time, and decision cycles are decreasing. Information’s importance is sinking into corporate culture, and information is often cited as a main company asset. Consider adding MDM, an EII server and operational BI to the operational environment to take advantage of earlier-stage information availability.

DMReview Magazine - Moving Business Intelligence to the Operational World, Part 1 of 2 (William McKnight, 8/1/2007)
Business intelligence (BI), utilizing data warehousing as a primary conduit, must change to adapt to competitive pressures. There are business realities forcing these changes. First, there is an information explosion, which can inundate a data warehouse''s intake capabilities and render nonautomated analysis to the most basic of levels. It is a real-time business world where suboptimally timed decisions can mean the difference between success and failure.

B-Eye-Network - EPCIS: Supply Chain Visibility and Business Intelligence (William McKnight, 7/31/2007)
Traditional BI vendors have been in a wait-and-see mode with RFID. Maybe EPCIS will spur some activity. In the meantime, leading companies are building custom RFID BI to get the most usage out of the EPCIS standard, as many have been doing with the draft of the standard for years. Other companies will be able to move RFID out of pilot and into full-scale production with EPCIS.

iSixSigma - Understanding Statistical Distributions for Six Sigma (Jeff Stroud, 7/25/2007)
To interpret data, consultants need to understand distributions. This article discusses how to understand different types of statistical distributions, understand the uses of different distributions, and make assumptions given a known distribution.

iSixSigma - Eliminating the Fear About Using Confidence Intervals (Jeff Stroud, 6/13/2007)
Help Green Belts use statistical analysis by emphasizing not only when and why a tool or methodology is used but also what the data says in "plain English." Memorizing complex formulas is not necessary, but basic formulas, should be shared.

DMReview Magazine - DW Design in the Real World, Part 5 of 5: Slowly Changing Dimensions (William McKnight, and Mike Cross of Rent-a-Center, 6/1/2007)
This is the fifth and final installment in a series of articles on data warehousing concepts and best practices. This column addresses slowly changing dimensions (SCDs) and an alternative to the standard styles and the use of a semaphore table.

iSixSigma - Measuring Six Sigma Financial and Operational Benefits (Bryan Carey, 5/30/2007)
For Six Sigma to succeed in a financial services organization, the deployment team and the business need to be able to measure the benefit of the projects. This should occur from both a financial and operational effectiveness perspective.

iSixSigma - Basic Sampling Strategies: Sample vs. Population Data (Jeff Stroud, 5/2/2007)
Taking samples of information can be an efficient way to draw conclusions when the cost of gathering all the data is impractical. Sound conclusions can often be drawn from a relatively small amount of data.

DMReview Magazine - DW Design in the Real World, Part 4 of 5: Hierarchical Relationships (William McKnight and Mike Cross, Rent-a-Center, 5/1/2007)
This is the fourth in a series of articles on data warehousing concepts and best practices. This article addresses a new area that is fundamental to good data warehouse design - hierarchical relationships.

iSixSigma - Six Sigma, Process Reengineering and Prototyping (Bryan Carey, 4/4/2007)
With no Design for Six Sigma experience, a financial services company used traditional process reengineering and the concept of prototyping to leverage Six Sigma and implement end-to-end process improvements based on the customer''''s perspective.

iSixSigma - Creating a High Performance Culture with Hoshin Kanri (CSI-DeLeeuw Client, Frank Deno, NYISO, 3/7/2007)
Often organizations plan effectively for performance gains, but fail to act on their plan to achieve their goals, leading to poor performance. Hoshin Kanri is a method that addresses the need to act on and achieve planned goals

DMReview Magazine - DW Design in the Real World, Part 3 of 5: Event-State Management (William McKnight and Mike Cross, Rent-a-Center, 3/1/2007)
Maintaining the state of events makes querying and reporting much easier and does not require the understanding of complicated business rules that associate events with states by the user. The business rules behind state changes can be implemented within the extract, transform and load (ETL) and with triggers, removing this burden from the report developers and user community.

Pharmaceutical Commerce - Information Technology: Data Warehouse Drives Client Profitability (AmerisourceBergen Speciality Group, 2/11/2007)
Client AmerisourceBergen Specialty Group talks about the success of their data warehouse and CSI’s role in their implementation. Registration required.

iSixSigma - Green Belt Coaching’s Role in Performance Management (Jeff Stroud, 2/7/2007)
The Six Sigma coach must be able to provide feedback on every Green Belt to that employee’s daily job supervisor in order to help bridge the gap of business-as-usual job performance, and that of the Green Belt''''''''s performance on their project.

DMReview Magazine - DW Design in the Real World, Part 2 of 5: Abstract Design (William McKnight and Mike Cross, Rent-a-Center, 2/1/2007)
The one overriding constant about data warehousing is that the data warehouse will change. Data designs that you spend months perfecting will become obsolete overnight, and unforeseen business requirements will require a different view of the data. If you want to be a successful data warehouse architect, you can either become very astute at accommodating change or you can design for the unknown.

B-Eye-Network - RFID Database Management Systems Architecture for Retailers (William McKnight, 1/30/2007)
There is a design decision to be made here about data to store in the persistent corporate data warehouse – all the detail or summaries only? While the detail data is interesting for the operational issues previously noted, it’s only going to be selectively (i.e., on a spot basis) interesting to headquarters and, therefore, stored in the corporate data warehouse. Headquarters will avail themselves of RFID data to conduct affinity analysis, customer profiling, visit optimization, customer servicing, m

iSixSigma - Business Process Reengineering in a Six Sigma World (Bryan Carey, 1/24/2007)
Using Six Sigma DMAIC with traditional BPR efforts provides a customer-centric view of project identification within an organization. Six Sigma’s DMAIC problem-solving discipline within a BPR effort can help an organization address its problems.

DMReview Magazine - Data Warehouse Design in the Real World, Part 1 of 5 (William McKnight and Mike Cross, Rent-a-Center, 1/2/2007)
There is a notion that all of an organization’s data, both current and historical, needs to be in the enterprise data warehouse, regardless of its current or future necessity. In today''''s world of exploding data, limited resources and viable architectural alternatives, this is not very practical.