How to sell your boss on the power of analytics

One would be hard-pressed to recall any major business intelligence and analytics conferences where keynote speakers and breakout presenters were not asked – frequently, repeatedly and quasi-desperately:

* How do I sell BI/analytics projects to my senior managers?
* How do I get executive buy-in?
* How do I calculate the ROI on the projects I am proposing?

Researchers at the IT Leadership Academy were fascinated by the paradox of high-payback, reasonable-risk BI/analytics projects that were put on the back burner in many otherwise thought-to-be-clever enterprises. We undertook a quick analysis in an attempt to understand what is going on here.
the food chain, while MySQL (which is even slated for SAP certification in two to three years, or maybe less) nips at Microsoft's heels.
Even more important, there's been an explosion in ultracheap OLAP technologies, both in-memory and in appliance formats. Most of these have very simple indexing schemes -- some have no indexes at all -- which yields huge TCO advantages in storage costs and administrative overhead alike.
The opportunity provided by these fledgling technologies might seem balanced by obvious risks. But before long, embracing them will be the only viable choice. The primary reason is schema explosion, on multiple fronts.
First, there's an explosion in profiles. CRM customer profiles (ideally with full Web site click-trail data), vendor profiles, security-oriented user profiles, you name it -- in almost all cases, the available information, and types of information, vary from one profilee to the next. Mobile/pervasive devices just worsen the problem, adding complexity in terms of location, availability and form factor. Centralized, pre-DBMS2 master data management will never succeed.
Second, text documents are becoming an ever bigger part of IT, be they complex forms and contracts, maintenance manuals, health records, Web marketing content or just e-mail. Documents are commonly unpredictable in structures and sometimes in authoring and editing metadata as well. And the ultimate solutions to making text search work will depend on further schema extension and variability, in a number of respects.