Baseline Consulting regularly publishes articles and develops white papers. These documents are designed to give executives and practitioners insight to substantially improve the effectiveness of their strategic information systems for business analytics, data warehousing, data management, and data integration.

You can browse the complete list of articles and white papers below.

» View Business Analytics articles and white papers
» View Data Warehousing articles and white papers
» View Data Management articles and white papers
» View Data Integration articles and white papers

Business Analytics

2006 White Papers

Governance: A BI Best Practice. Use a very practical framework as a tool to design and communicate the BI program governance. Establish BI guiding principles, align decision-making bodies with decision areas, and define oversight mechanisms. As business leaders work through the steps of the framework, they build consensus on the need for BI Governance, and develop a sense of ownership and commitment.
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2006 Articles

Customer Management: A Matter of Perspective. Are you sure your CRM investment yields customer satisfaction? Find out why customer experience realities are turning conventional CRM thinking inside out.
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Let’s Play Post Office! This paper describes the big difference data quality can make to your business results. Learn how to engage and educate end users about data quality using a scenario which aligns customer record address data with USPS standards.
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Back to the Future: BI Governance. Not sure how your companies relies on BI? Discover how BI governance can yield high-value returns from your BI investment.
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2005 Articles

Do-It-Yourself Tune-Up for Your BI Environment. Is getting answers taking longer than anticipated? Learn what you can do to rev up your sluggish Bi environment.
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There’s More BI Behind Your Credit Cards Than Customer Loyalty. Want more profitable customer relationship? Learn how credit cards could offer greater insight into driving customer profitability.
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Ten Mistakes to Avoid When Estimating ROI for Business Intelligence. As the ROI discussion grows louder, the mistakes also become more apparent. This article outlines what we’ve seen to be the most common missteps managers make in financially justifying their business intelligence (BI) and data warehouse programs. Article originally appeared in TDWI Quarterly, Q1 2004.
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2004 White Papers

The Bottom Line on Bad Customer Data. Do you know your data? Get insight into how bad data is impacting your company and what you can do about it. Learn how to identify where the bad data is and quantify its impact. Discover approaches in determining the sources and causes of bad data.
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E-mail Campaign Management: Ten Best Practices. The ten best practices – many of which apply to all marketing channels – will help maximize intended results of using e-mail while minimizing unintended consequences.
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2004 Interviews

Finding the Vein of Pain: Quantifying ROI for IT Initiatives. Evan Levy, Baseline President and Co-Founder, focuses on the financial payback of IT investments in his radio interview on SkyRadio.
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2003 White Papers

Find ROI: Justifying – and Re-justifying – Strategic IT Programs. To find ROI, managers must understand that creating a protracted business case is no longer enough. They must quantify the projected payback of their proposed project and back up their assertions with factual data. Only then can they – and their companies – move forward with the confidence that the project will be worth the investment.
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Customer Management: Whose Line Is It? CRM is delivering on its sales and marketing promise, but customers still defect. Why? The customer has no real voice in the “relationship” and the company is not looking for ways to walk a mile in the customer’s shoes.
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2002 White Papers

Turning CRM Project Lemons into Lemonade. Learn the variables that push CRM initiatives towards success or failure, the tactics used to minimize the risks, and what you can do to re-align, refocus, and reenergize CRM projects that have gone awry by positioning CRM for success.
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Integrating CRM with ERP. Understand how to evaluate proposals from ERP vendors against “best of breed” CRM approaches. We include the strategic criteria management should use when evaluating these CRM solutions, and we present a best practices approach to CRM implementation, with an emphasis on CRM – ERP integration.
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2002 Articles

Top Down or Bottom Up? One Company’s CRM Roadmap. Find out: Where to start with your CRM deployment; how to map CRM objectives to end user and data requirements; and, lessons learned from a CRM deployment case study. Originally appeared in DMReview, October 2002.
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CRM Resurrection. The five golden rules for revitalizing moribund initiatives in a glacial economy. Article originally appeared in Intelligent Enterprise, January 14, 2002.
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How to Choose CRM Software. Don’t let vendor hype or the CFO’s golf buddy drive your CRM decision. You need a plan based on business requirements. Article originally appeared in ComputerWorld, February 18, 2002.
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Clickstreams Downstream: What’s next for Clickstream Analysis. The business action taken as a result of data analysis is imperative to derive the benefit of BI. Article originally appeared in Teradata Magazine, Spring 2002.
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Pre-2002 White Papers

The Lowdown on Data Mining. Data mining is a high-yield but complex form of knowledge discovery. Before you even think about using this technology, make sure you know what it is, and what you need.
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Data Warehousing

2006 White Papers

Data Warehouse Best Practices—An Implementation Framework. Data warehousing implementation projects can end up being highly complex and costly if you’re not careful. While the platforms and technologies have evolved over the years, some fundamental best practices have emerged that can mean the difference between another legacy system and a business solution. At Baseline, we use a simple implementation framework to keep projects on track and accelerate delivery.
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2006 Articles

Your Data: Right or Wrong. Do you think of your data warehouse as just another corporate database? Find out why there’s more to database implementation than designing physical data models and database administration.
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Give Me What I Mean – Not What I Say. Are you delivering against requirements, yet end users are still unsatisfied? Discover how to give end users what they really need from their data warehouse.
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Outsource, Rightsource, or Offshore? Managing Outsourced Development of Your Data Warehouse. What are the real impacts of outsourcing your data warehouse? Find out how to right-source your IT organization and resources.
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Mr. Outsourcer? The Subsequent Backlash Is Here to See You. IT departments often assume that outsourced projects are less complex than in-house projects. Baseline finds that management and people issues actually render outsourced projects more complex, requiring a higher degree of management and oversight. And data warehouses, which are frequently viewed as strategic, up the ante in terms of the need for rigor and expertise. Article originally appeared in DMReview, Problem Solved column, March 2006.
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Baseline on Data Warehouse Appliances. Data warehouse out-of-the-box impossible you say? Discover why a data warehouse appliance may be the pre-fab way for you to deploy applications faster.
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2005 White Papers

The Data Warehouse RFP. Understanding how to submit an RFP will not only guide your vendors in delivering optimal responses, but will save you a lot of work in evaluating the resulting proposals. This report shows you: Why there is more to RFP preparation and review than price comparisons; key metrics to consider when comparing vendor solutions and technologies; a proven approach and outline for an effective RFP.
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2005 Articles

Earning the Grade: One Score-at-a-Time. Confident you’re on top of all aspects about your business intelligence (BI) capabilities? Find out how to monitor and measure to know for sure.
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5 Signs of an Aging Data Warehouse. Many of our data warehouses and marts have been in production so long that we take them for granted. So, how do you know when it’s time for a make over? Find out how to detect the early signs of aging.
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A Nip and Tuck for Your Aging Data Warehouse. Are you losing your competitive advantage because of an aging data warehouse? Find out how to rejuvenate your warehouse and breathe new life into ailing Bi implementations.
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Ten Mistakes to Avoid When Considering Data Warehouse Alternatives. During the last couple of years, a number of new technologies have attempted to attack the data deluge head-on: web services; Enterprise Information Integration (EII); tool-based data integration solutions; and enterprise service buses. This 10 Mistakes issue outlines what we’ve seen to be the most common missteps technical teams make in the review and selection of data warehouse alternatives. Article originally appeared in TDWI Quarterly, April 2005.
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Pre-2002 Articles

Data Warehouse, Metadata, and Middleware. This is a brief review of the fundamental technologies that are comprised in a data warehouse. Understanding these basics can help you sound intelligent with your colleagues and vendors, and prevent some of the inevitable doubletalk that occurs when technology staff and business people meet to discuss business solutions.
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Questions to Ask Your Data Warehouse Vendors. Even if you have a production data warehouse, the constant of change is ever present. So it’s a good thing to know who’s who. That way, when it comes time to re-engineer, re-design, re-architect, or re-vamp your data warehouse infrastructure, you’ll know where to turn for help. Excerpted from e-Data by Jill Dyche.
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Beating the Data Mart Blues. Some companies that have paid distributed data dues are thinking about consolidating onto centralized warehouses. Here’s why you should.
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Data Management

2006 Articles

MDM: The Year in Review. 2006 has been a big year for Master Data Management. We thought we’d dedicate our year-end Problem Solved column to some of the lessons we’ve learned from our MDM customer projects. Article originally published in DMReview, Problem Solved column, December 2006.
» Read DMReview article

Enterprise View: Face to Face with MDM. Baseline Consulting’s partners discuss the impact of master data management and customer data integration on data warehousing. This interview originally appeared in Teradata Magazine, November 2006.
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The Next Wave in Customer Data Management. Without new practices, roles, handoffs, and even language around data management, promising customer data integration initiatives are headed for failure. Article originally published in Intelligent Enterprise, July 2006.
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What People Are Asking About Master Data Management. Is Master Data Management a panacea or a Pandora’s box? Find out more about what MDM can and can’t do for you.
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2005 White Papers

Measuring the Value of Metadata. Ignoring the warning signs of missing metadata? This report shows you: An approach to arriving at a value metric for your company; a model to help predict metadata return; criteria and techniques to use for measuring return and performance.
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2005 Articles

Bigger Than the Data Warehouse: Launching Your Information Center of Excellence. How’s your BI Competency Center doing? Could it be delivering more? Explore why you may need the Information Center of Excellence.
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When Data Models Are Not Enough. Consider your enterprise data model the holy grail? Discover why data models may not be the panacea for all your data maladies.
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Dial 411: Where is the Data? Not sure where to find your data or if it even exists? Find out how metadata can ensure everyone is reading from the same page.
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“Productionalizing” Data Quality. Are you sure all that data you’re provisioning is accurate? Learn why data quality is a process and not a one-time project.
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Are We There Yet? Quantifying Data Management for BI. Have you checked under the hood of your BI framework lately? Discover why there’s more to delivering BI than your favorite reporting tool.
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Data Integration

2006 White Papers

The Challenges of Customer Data Integration (CDI). The need to clean, manage, process, and maintain customer data in a sustained and deliberate way is emerging as more than a best practice, but a business imperative. CDI projects, while technically complex, should deliver meaningful customer data to the business at large. It could mean nothing less than competitive advantage. Originally published by DataFlux, 2006.
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A Taxonomy of Data Integration Alternatives. Data integration has traditionally been a challenge for IT practitioners who must support the business’ need to analyze and process cross-functional and heterogeneous data. As new data integration solutions like CDI emerge, it’s a good time to take a look at some classic and emerging solutions for data integration.
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Launching Your CDI Program: The Pitch, the Plan, the People. Marrying incumbent technologies, available skill sets, and business processes with a new paradigm of “integration on demand” means that launching a CDI effort is different, arguably more specialized than other strategic IT programs. In this paper, we describe the critical success factors to consider when starting up CDI, involving larger master data management (MDM) principles, but delivering business value incrementally and quickly. White paper, sponsored by DataFlux, originally published in 2006.
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Identity Resolution: A Key to CDI Value. Customer Data Integration (CDI) is rapidly becoming a key combination of practices, techniques, and tools to effectively consolidate and manage a unique view of your organization’s customers. Yet how are these CDI applications able to handle the many possible errors, variations, and anomalies in customer data? A powerful concept called identity resolution provides an answer. White paper, sponsored by Identity Systems, originally published in October 2006.
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2006 Articles

Synergy with SOA: What Data Warehouse Professionals Should Know. A 2006 InformationWeek survey of 120 business and technology professionals found that 82 percent of respondents hoped to achieve increased flexibility by moving to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) framework. With the pervasiveness and promise of SOA, it’s certain to affect not only operational but also analytical systems. Here’s a compendium of SOA basics that BI and data warehouse managers and practitioners should know. Article originally appeared in TDWI Flashpoint, October 19, 2006.
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Ten Mistakes to Avoid When Planning Your CDI/MDM Project. Companies like Amgen, Intuit, XO Communications, and Royal Bank of Canada have all delivered early wins with customer master data, achieving quantifiable and high-profile business breakthroughs. In this Ten Mistakes to Avoid, we’ll outline what we’ve seen to be the biggest barriers to successful customer data integration and master data management (MDM) programs. Article originally appeared in TDWI Quarterly, Q3 2006.
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Building a Different CDI Team. Staffing your CDI project like your data warehouse, CRM, or ERP teams? Discover why your CDI team should be different from your traditional project development teams.
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Making CDI Work: An Implementation Process. Believe in the promise of CDI but don’t know where to start? Learn where to start and how to approach your CDI implementation.
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The Challenges of CDI: Data Quality. Confident your customer data is integrated across systems and organizations? Discover why it may not be after all and what you can do about it.
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EII and Your Data Warehouse: Peaceful Coexistence. Do EII and Data Warehousing compete or complement one another? Discover the possible data integration alternatives you may have.
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BI Without a Warehouse? Architectural Alternatives for Data Integration. Does a lower-cost alternative to data warehousing for data access sound like nirvana to you? Discover the possible data integration alternatives you may have.
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Beyond the Data Warehouse: Architectural Options for Data Integration. These days the presumption that integrating data requires a centralized platform is an increasingly debatable one. So where does this leave the data warehouse? Discover the possible alternatives you may have.
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Making the Case for CDI. As important as CDI is from a data integration standpoint, its real value may be in automating and enforcing key processes and job responsibilities that will enable a company to fund and sustain the management of both customer and non-customer data on behalf of the enterprise. Article originally appeared in DMReview, 2006.
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2005 White Papers

What Managers Need to Know About CDI. End users are wild about their dashboards but suspect of the data? This report shows you: What CDI is and how it works; what critical success factors you should consider in delivering effective CDI; how to approach CRM from a fresh CDI perspective.
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