Where are the best Business Intelligence (BI) resources? The answer, borrowing from any seasoned software architect, is, "It depends." Resources take the form of articles, blogs, books, conferences, training courses, vendors, user groups and fests, and online forums.
Your dependencies are based on the aspect of BI for which you seek knowledge. Hans Peter Luhn is regularly credited with coining the term in 1958 through his research at IBM. BI is a broad topic, encompassing skills, processes, technologies, applications and practices used to support decision making. Implementing BI requires the collaboration of many people and departments in an organisation, and various roles need quite different resources.
Vetting the pool of knowledge, and the oft-seen puddles, is left to the researcher, with this caveat: Communities that gather for transparent discussion on the matters that comprise BI are not shy about pointing out falsehoods and 'lies, damn lies.'
Articles
DevX recently published an article that I wrote on the topic Creating a Business Intelligence Steering Committee which addresses roles and a collaborative focus to ensure success.
Articles are only one of many resources available, and the topics span the breadth of BI. Deep dives into strategy, analytics, design, tools, management and processes abound and are often found through searching with appropriate terms at Google, Bing, Ask, or other engines. For instance, articles for understanding, building, discussing, and measuring dashboards are but a few, varied search terms away:
Using the simple search term bi dashboard at Google on January 30, 2010 returned:
Articles, many with vivid examples, are available with ease on the range of BI topics. Refining the search term returns a focused set of links that have been valued by algorithms to contain useful information. Extend the query to become bi dashboard best practices and you have a couple of good hours of research and review from the first page of results, alone.
Blogs
As with articles, blogs span the BI space. Before his tragic death, Dr. Cyril Brookes wrote extensively on the art and science of business intelligence systems. Graciously, the library of articles is still maintained.
Craig Utley, the author and seasoned BI architect, writes and provides video tutorials on technical aspects of warehouse and cube development in the Microsoft BI stack of SQL Server, Analysis Services, Integration Services, and Reporting Services at LearnMicrosoftBI.
The difference in content for these two sites is clear, but each is equally valuable to the visitor seeking the content.
Books
Other than peers, books are a most traditional resource. When purchased from a major publisher, we trust business and technical books to contain authoritative information authored by people with requisite insight.
SIDEBAR: Think of the changes we've recently seen in how we acquire music and movies. Thousands and thousands of downloads happen daily, directly from the artist's site. The artist retains the fees. The artist has few expenses, comparatively, even for high quality digital recording studios running on consumer hardware. Similarly, writers have options for direct access to their audiences via on demand book printing. Gutenberg would be pleased to see the capabilities of the recent advances in digital printing and binding, don't you agree? These machines make it possible for on-demand publishing from AuthorHouse and SimpleTalk. These companies have different business models, but both benefit from the ability to print as few as one copy of a title. AuthorHouse (ahem, a Hoosier company, operating successfully from Indianapolis and Bloomington while serving the world) will print your book and optionally make it available through sources like Amazon. SimpleTalk, on the other hand, produces a line of deeply researched technical books related to databases. Their authors are quite well known to a sizable community of database administrators and developers worldwide. Both firms, and their authors, benefit greatly from the on-demand printing technologies.
Other resource categories to explore include conferences, training courses, vendors, user groups and fests, and online forums.
I will expand on these categories soon.