Over the last few years there has been a lot of industry buzz about the future of the enterprise data warehouse (EDW). Maybe we should change the classic EDW acronym for a new title: Extended Data Warehouse.

With a user experience background, I take usability seriously when designing and developing reports. Usability provides end users with polished reporting that is intuitive while still informative. Paying attention to these details can make a huge difference.

For example, “stop light” thresholds are a great conditional formatting style to quickly identify key indicators. They can help users identify which region is growing fastest or is poorly performing.

A report uses red, yellow, and green circular indicators that are commonly associated with the flow of intersection traffic (red for warning or stop, yellow for caution or slow and green for go).

While these stop light colors are known everywhere, what if the end user is color blind?

This blog entry was published on TIBCO Spotfire’s Business Intelligence blog, by Linda Rosencrance, of the Spotfire Blogging Team. Here are 13 of her favorite data quotes – gathered from a number of sources on the web – from CEOs, statisticians, authors and even Sherlock Holmes.

I thought it was really cool!

Steven Swoyer, an insightful TDWI author, recently posted in BI This Week that Analytics just isn’t what it used to be. As some business intelligence (BI) and decision-support veterans see it, the term itself has lost some of its meaning. Just how much is a subject of some debate.

Gartner, Inc. has identified the top technology trends that will play key roles in modernizing information management (IM) in 2013 and beyond, making the role of information governance increasingly important.

In her annual preview, Cindi Howson, founder of BI Scorecard, takes a look at what she sees for 2013. It’s a short list of BI hot buttons, including dashboards, self-service, mobile, in-memory, cloud, collaboration and, of course, big data.