Welcome to my expert channel that focuses on the practice and technology for business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing (DW). We are experiencing a rapid change in how BI/DW is being used within corporations, globally both large and small. When I was first involved, we called it decision support systems, affecting only executives and using time-sharing services over 300-baud modems. IFPS from Execucom was the latest and greatest. Financial analysis was the extent of business intelligence, and manual data entry was the extent of data warehousing. We could not even spell “terabyte” back then. Oh, has a lot changed!

What are the key issues with business intelligence and data warehousing? I am focusing on the issues surrounding these topics: business value of low latency data, real-time business intelligence, data warehouse appliances, use of virtual world technology, ethics of business intelligence and globalization of business intelligence. If any of these are vital to you, subscribe to my channel. Please submit your comments on my articles and blogs. Your thoughts are important and should be shared with our BI/DW professional colleagues. Further, you can contact me directly via email at richardh@bolder.com, via Twitter at www.twitter.com/hackathorn or via LinkedIn at "Hackathorn."

Dr. Richard Hackathorn is founder and president of Bolder Technology, Inc. He has more than thirty years of experience in the information technology industry as a well-known industry analyst, technology innovator and international educator. He has pioneered many innovations in database management, decision support, client-server computing, database connectivity, associative link analysis, data warehousing, and web farming. Focus areas are: business value of timely data, real-time business intelligence (BI), data warehouse appliances, ethics of business intelligence and globalization of BI.

Richard has published numerous articles in trade and academic publications, presented regularly at leading industry conferences and conducted professional seminars in eighteen countries. He writes regularly for the BeyeNETWORK.com and has a channel for his blog, articles and research studies. He is a member of the IBM Gold Consultants since its inception, the Boulder BI Brain Trust and the Independent Analyst Platform.

Dr. Hackathorn has written three professional texts, entitled Enterprise Database Connectivity, Using the Data Warehouse (with William H. Inmon), and Web Farming for the Data Warehouse.

Editor's Note: More articles and resources are available in Richard's BeyeNETWORK Expert Channel. Be sure to visit today!