Dream the Possible DreamDream the Possible Dream

A premier automobile manufacturer, well aware that car buyers today demand something close to perfection, employs text mining to gain advance knowledge of problems so it can address them sooner. A healthcare provider, battling rapidly accelerating costs and public anxiety about patient care, uses sophisticated databases, reporting and analytics to communicate to medical decision makers an integrated view of patterns and relationships hidden in dispersed patient records, drug treatment results and disease demographics. A high-tech manufacturer, facing not only erratic sales but also new demands to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, brings business performance into focus thanks to the CIO's determination to bridge information silos and deploy enterprisewide business intelligence (BI) and content management.

These are the stories from the front lines of the revolution—one that is transforming the abilities of public and private organizations to learn about their customers, bring efficiency and flexibility to critical processes and blow away barriers to competitive success and higher profitability. Intelligent Enterprise readers are on these front lines: a place where risks are high, technology brilliance is merely half the battle and the rewards can reshape entire industries.

Dear readers, welcome to your remodeled and revitalized Intelligent Enterprise! We're excited to kick off 2005 with a new look, new sections and, thanks to our merger with Transform Magazine, a more holistic view of data—the raw material of enterprise intelligence.

As this issue's cover story explores, open standards, technology progress and urgent demand are making it possible for your organization to integrate islands of information and establish a new foundation for strategic applications that will shape the future. You are the change agents—the IT managers, application strategists, enterprise business architects and analytics experts who will shape technology to solve key strategic challenges. Our mission is to bring you practical, expert guidance-and to tell your story, so that we can help members of our pioneering community learn from each other's experiences.

Transform, heretofore our sister magazine, lived in a parallel world focused largely on "unstructured" data found in text documents, email, Web content and multimedia. Doug Henschen, editor in chief of Transform, joins our publication as editor. In six years at the helm of Transform, Doug developed a deep understanding of how content shapes business process management, Web services, customer interaction systems, collaboration and portal applications, and the application of text analysis, search engines and other methods classified as "knowledge management." We're happy to have Doug on board as we take a fresh look at how your enterprise can leverage all information resources and increase the intelligence of your decision-making.

BI, data warehousing, service-oriented architecture and enterprise applications will continue to be frequent subjects in Intelligent Enterprise. We're pleased to bring you the regular insights of our contributing editors Joshua Greenbaum, Seth Grimes, Ralph Kimball, Margy Ross, Ian Shoales, Mark Smith and Don Tapscott. Senior editor Jeanette Burriesci heads up our new Dashboard section as well as the "Put to the Test" product review section, both of which will feature familiar Intelligent Enterprise contributing writers.

Be sure to check out our redesigned Web site, too, at IntelligentEnterprise.com. We've overhauled our site to make it easier for you to access content and take advantage of the technology coverage of our parent company, CMP Media.

We hope you enjoy this issue! Email us at [email protected]. We await your feedback.

DAVID STODDER is the Editorial Director and Editor in Chief of Intelligent Enterprise.