This week I am attending Teradata Partners in DC (well, more adequately National Harbor, MD).  This morning the keynote featured Don Tapscott – author (Wikinomics as one example) and visionary on information technology and the information age in general. His talk centered around the changing workforce, collaboration, and how new grads and entrants to the workforce will help drive changes in the way we conduct business. Web 2.0 and the need to integrate data on varying levels creates the need to look at things differently. How this relates to business intelligence is that people are looking for ways to make faster decisions and get better insights into their information. Consequently, not only is information power, but the ability to collaborate on broader levels and gain operational insight into what is happening on a daily basis increases the overall importance of collecting valid data.

Obviously, the data part is where Teradata comes in.  James Vollmer, the presting of the Partners Steering Committee and Lead Architect at Enterprise Holdings discussed the speed at which business is changing and the requirements to address this change. Enterprise car rentals provided an example where Teradata was used to integrate data from external sources (such as insurance related data) in order to speed up orders, leading to lower wait times and happier customers.

In addition to this example, Michael Koehler, President and CEO of Teradata tied business intelligence and data warehousing together by discussing the reasons companies use BI and data warehousing together :

1. to gain better intelligence
2. to make faster decisions
3. to lower costs

Although this doesn’t always seem realistic to companies struggling with their current BI projects and business issues, the reality is that the insights presented today at the keynote session can be achieved by organizations looking to accomplish these same goals.