Oracle said it is buying Endeca Technologies, a move that will bolster its capabilities for searching and analyzing unstructured information. Endeca is a privately held unstructured data management and Web commerce software company. 

BARC recently announced the results of their BI Survey 10 - The Customer Verdict. They received nearly 3000 responses for this survey so it's quite a comprehensive look at the state of business intelligence.

One of the most interesting findings in their survey was that the most frequent problem encountered by BI teams is company politics. Last year data quality was the most frequently cited problem, but internal politics has now worked it's way to the top of the list.

There's long been talk about information democratization, but evidently the reality is that everyone is not on the same page when it comes to receiving maximum benefit from an enterprise's data assets. To me, this means that as BI professionals, we need to create better alignment with the executive team as we move business intelligence forward so that political issues can be mitigated and the true benefits of BI can be attained.

For more information about the survey, visit http://www.bi-survey.com/

Bill Inmon is heading to Washington, D.C. for the Data Management Forum on November 3rd and 4th. This is a great opportunity for you to hear Bill explain why data warehousing is changing and how the next generation data warehouses should be architected.

The actual conference is on November 4, but Bill will be presenting a one-day tutorial on November 3. Bill's pre-conference seminar should not be missed -- you'll learn everything you need to know to architect your enterprise to optimize business intelligence and data warehousing.

Bill's also presenting the keynote at the conference on November 4, Next Generation Data Warehousing: Strategies for Success. And there's a great line-up of other presenters too:

• Juan Gorricho, Director of Data Warehousing and Analytics at Walt Disney World Parks & Resorts
• Adrian Gardner, CIO and Director of Information, Technology & Communications,NASA
• Peter Aiken, Founding Director, Data Blueprint, Associate Professor, VCU, President, DAMA International  
• Michael Hermida, President, K3MP Technologies, Past Lead Architect on Space Shuttle and Spacelab Programs, IBM Program Manager

Mark your calendars now and visit the Data Management Forum website for more details about the presentations.

I want to tell you about a unique opportunity to spend 60 minutes talking personally to Bill Inmon about your data warehouse issues. At the upcoming Advanced Architecture Conference that's being held on September 26-28 in Genesee, Colorado, you could do just that. Or you could spend an hour with any of the other presenters at that conference.Here's a partial line-up of the speakers available for private discussions:

• Bill Inmon on data warehousing and unstructured data
• Dan Lindstedt on data vault
• Hans Hultgren on data vault
• Krish Krishnan on data warehouse architecture
• Derek Strauss on DW 2.0
• Ross Leher on taxonomies
• Steve Hitchman on Agile data warehousing
• Thomas Groh on BI and the cloud
• Bill Bird on real world architecture issues
• Larissa Moss on data warehousing
• Patty Haines on data warehousing and unstructured data

Visit the conference website to register for the conference and book your one-on-one sessions while there are still open slots.

I recently talked with Scott Staples, one of the co-founders of MindTree and President of the Americas, about the slow adoption of analytics by some companies. We covered a lot of ground in the Q&A, and one of the things we talked about was how companies are benefiting from analytics. Scott explained that while financial services and CPG companies have been using analytics successfully for quite some time, other companies and industries aren't jumping in with both feet. We discussed the reasons for that and also the challenges that companies face as they evolve to analytics-driven organizations. You can read about that and the other things we discussed here.