Larry Goodwin, president of The College of St. Scholastica writes, in Solving the "It's My Data' Mess, about the trials and tribulations of implementing a business intelligence platform for a small, private institution. The article is from University Business magazine. If it is reflective of the essays in the book linked-to below, then both are well worth a read for their perspective on the processes involved.

[P]utting the BI system into operation was not easy. The difficulty was not technological or quantitative; it was political: Who controls the fundamental data definitions? In the meetings of a large committee established to implement BI, it became obvious that people whose primary interests were tactical and departmental couldn’t agree on common definitions. Senior administration had to take hands-on control—our second lesson learned. ...

A BI system can be costly ($250,000 for us up front) and require significant staff training (intensive for key users for three to eight weeks; ongoing, more moderate, for a year). But the payback is generous and quick. Data reporting has increased ten-fold. Time spent retrieving information has been reduced 50 to 75 percent. Collections work that took a monthly half day now takes less than a minute. The controller saves over eight hours each semester on reconciling numbers. And so forth. Best of all, data is reliable and consistent, allowing for accurate and integrated planning, budgeting, and assessment.

It is excerpted from President to President: Views on Technology in Higher Education Volume II, published by Sungard Higher Ed and the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC). That entire publication can be downloaded as a PDF at no cost here.

This writer's response to discussion of "information overload" has become pretty routine. Hearing that phrase makes me want to yawn. This nice essay in The Chronicle Review by Ann Blairabout information management before digital books is a calm, somewhat reflective piece of a sort I would like to see more of. In the near future, when I hear talk about "distraction," I will use this phrase from Seneca's work: "[T]he abundance of books is a distraction."

Reactions to overload have often been emotional, whether hostile or enthusiastic. Early negative responses include Ecclesiastes 12:12 ("Of making books there is no end," probably from the fourth or third century BC) and Seneca's "distringit librorum multitudo" ("the abundance of books is distraction," first century AD). But we also find enthusiasm for accumulation—of papyri at the Library of Alexandria (founded in the early third century BC) or of the 20,000 "facts" that Pliny the Elder accumulated in Historia naturalis (completed in AD 77). Though we no longer care especially about ancient precedent, we hear the same doom and praise today.

Overload has also triggered pragmatic responses, as generations have done their best to locate and use the information they seek, under inevitable constraints of time, energy, and other resources. Typically we select from collective storage facilities, like libraries and the Internet, and not only books and Web pages but also specific parts of them (like arguments, quotations, or facts). If we wish to revisit results, we need to store them so that they are retrievable. Electronic media have prompted attempts (as in Microsoft's MyLifeBits) to store the entirety of an individual's experiences, but among scholars a more conventional method is to take notes and store selections or summaries.