Online analytical processing (OLAP) is a powerful and essential tool in every BI toolbox, enabling decisionmakers to easily explore operational data in powerful ways. OLAP is fundamentally a descriptive tool. It provides intelligence about what has happened and can trigger an effective, albeit reactive, response.

Can work be too structured?

The project is delayed. The team is missing deadlines despite schedule revisions. The quality of software is not up to the mark. The best developers are leaving the company. Customers are complaining.

Some companies constantly adjust their strategy -- business models, processes, and responses to the competition -- while other companies have offices of strategic planning, which conduct annual strategic planning exercises that involve lots of senior people and take several months to complete.

Sometimes it helps to step back a little and assess how we're doing, to identify the management trends that seem to be taking hold. The data we have collected over the past year suggests a number of trends -- mostly good -- that we should identify and discuss. These include:

"Adopt thy partners. The real-time enterprise must span the physical boundaries of an enterprise and should extend as a virtual enterprise through the entire end-to-end chain. For example, Colgate-Palmolive trimmed its inventory 13% and saved [US] $150 million by attaching its order planning systems to thousands of Wal-Mart and Kmart cash registers.