You go online to buy a digital camera. Soon, you realize you've bought a more expensive camera than intended, along with extra batteries, charger, and graphics software-all at the prompting of the retailer.

Happy with your purchases? The retailer certainly is, and if you are too, you both can be said to be the beneficiaries of "customer intimacy" achieved through the transformation of data collected during this visit or stored from previous visits into real business intelligence that can be exercised in real time.

"Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence for e-Commerce" is a practical exploration of the technological innovations through which traditional data warehousing is brought to bear on this and other less modest e-commerce applications, such as those at work in B2B, G2C, B2G, and B2E models. The authors examine the core technologies and commercial products in use today, providing a nuts-and-bolts understanding of how you can deploy customer and product data in ways that meet the unique requirements of the online marketplace-particularly if you are part of a brick-and-mortar company with specific online aspirations. In so doing, they build a powerful case for investment in and aggressive development of these approaches, which are likely to separate winners from losers as e-commerce grows and matures.
* Includes the latest from successful data warehousing consultants whose work has encouraged the field's new focus on e-commerce.
* Presents information that is written for both consultants and practitioners in companies of all sizes.
* Emphasizes the special needs and opportunities of traditional brick-and-mortar businesses that are going online or participating in B2B supply chains or e-marketplaces.
* Explains how long-standing assumptions about data warehousing have to be rethought in light of emerging business models that depend on customer intimacy.
* Provides advice on maintaining data quality and integrity in environments marked by extensive customer self-input.
* Advocates careful planning that will help both old economy and new economy companies develop long-lived and successful e-commerce strategies.
* Focuses on data warehousing for emerging e-commerce areas such as e-government and B2E environments.

Corporations and governmental agencies of all sizes are embracing a new generation of enterprise-scale business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing (DW), and very often appoint a single senior-level individual to serve as the Enterprise BI/DW Program Manager. This book is the essential guide to the incremental and iterative build-out of a successful enterprise-scale BI/DW program comprised of multiple underlying projects, and what the Enterprise Program Manager must successfully accomplish to orchestrate the many moving parts in the quest for true enterprise-scale business intelligence and data warehousing. Author Alan Simon has served as an enterprise business intelligence and data warehousing program management advisor to many of his clients, and spent an entire year with a single client as the adjunct consulting director for a $10 million enterprise data warehousing (EDW) initiative. He brings a wealth of knowledge about best practices, risk management, organizational culture alignment, and other Critical Success Factors (CSFs) to the discipline of enterprise-scale business intelligence and data warehousing.

Nearly every large corporation and governmental agency is taking a fresh look at their current enterprise-scale business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing implementations at the dawn of the "Big Data Era"...and most see a critical need to revitalize their current capabilities. Whether they find the frustrating and business-impeding continuation of a long-standing "silos of data" problem, or an over-reliance on static production reports at the expense of predictive analytics and other true business intelligence capabilities, or a lack of progress in achieving the long-sought-after enterprise-wide "single version of the truth" - or all of the above - IT Directors, strategists, and architects find that they need to go back to the drawing board and produce a brand new BI/data warehousing roadmap to help move their enterprises from their current state to one where the promises of emerging technologies and a generation's worth of best practices can finally deliver high-impact, architecturally evolvable enterprise-scale business intelligence and data warehousing. Author Alan Simon, whose BI and data warehousing experience dates back to the late 1970s and who has personally delivered or led more than thirty enterprise-wide BI/data warehousing roadmap engagements since the mid-1990s, details a comprehensive step-by-step approach to building a best practices-driven, multi-year roadmap in the quest for architecturally evolvable BI and data warehousing at the enterprise scale. Simon addresses the triad of technology, work processes, and organizational/human factors considerations in a manner that blends the visionary and the pragmatic.

This timely book brings together the stories of St Francis - his preaching to birds, rejection of wealth, caring for lepers, befriending animals and living simply, his poetry and hymnody in praise of creation that is still sung today - and the influential writings and examples of inspiring Franciscans who have followed him such as Clare, Bonaventure, Duns Scotus and Angela of Foligno, and draws them into conversation with contemporary concerns for our planet. It gathers 800 years of accumulated wisdom and practical examples of how Franciscans have found ways to live at home and at peace with creation. It explores that long tradition and experience to ask what lessons can be drawn for today to challenge and enable readers to re-visit their own relationship with creation.

A CIA-Mossad operation is compromised. The "Wolves of Islam" are assassinating counterterrorist officers. Can Sean Brogan identify and terminate those responsible before the Mideast explodes?