Comparing eweek.com and the Business Intelligence Network for IT professionals

¶ … b-eye-Network.com and eweek.com

Summary Description

Comparing eweek.com and Business Intelligence Network (www.b-eye.network.com) serve the same audiences in the it community, focusing on giving it professionals from the technical staff through management to senior level positions insights into how current industry developments and trends will impact their organizations. Of the two, eweek.com, having grown from the famous PC Week magazine of the 1990s, is much more focused on immediate and urgent news. The Business Intelligence Network on the other hand is more focused on the more longer-term implications of trends in the market, and as a result spending more time on the area of Spotlights, Industry Channels, and has taken the time to cultivate Experts including Jill Dyche who regularly writes on CRM and Master Data Management (MDM). In the Business Intelligence Network there is also a balance of vendor-supplied content, a practice eweek and its publisher, Ziff Davis refuse to do unless it is very clear that is' a paid arrangement. Of the two, eweek.com is much more concerned about appearing too close to any specific software vendor, while the Business Intelligence Network seems to be fine with the intrusion of vendor messaging on their site. In summary however both sites deliver exceptionally in-depth content and also have a series of experts on staff who provide excellent insights.

What the site does and does not give you

Both sites deliver a tremendous amount of content, with the one major difference being that Business Intelligence Network focuses on the implications at a longer-term scale of integrating technologies to support key business strategies. The aspects of how it permanently changes a persons' role in an organization is thoroughly explored in each area of the site, as is discussed in the article the Hard Side of Change Management (2005). Further, the Business Intelligence Network further promotes in-depth insights into applying it to business strategies by vertical market, an area that eweek.com does not deliver. Alternatively eweek.com does track breaking news in over 30 different areas of the it industry, and also has increasingly begun to use online videos to further explain core concepts.

Both sites however do not have more expanded coverage of leading edge technologies including latent semantic indexing, the use of search bots or automated routines to find and build semantic models of data from the Internet, and do not support the ability to benchmark once vendor against another. Both sites also don't go to the depth of technical information that ITToolbox.com does for example, for the hands-on practitioners of it development.

Why the site will or will not be used as part of a professional resources list

Both sites are very popular with it professionals from the developer level through management and to the senior management level. Both sites also provide excellent content and are on many professional resources lists as well due to the topical nature of the high quality content produced.

Reasons to return back to the site

Both sites have blogs, columnists and additional sources of content on a regular basis that give the readers many reasons to back to these sites. The analysis of immediate news from eweek.com and the strategic analysis of industry moves analyzed by Business Intelligence Network columnists are equally valuable.

What information was expected to be found and was not there Advanced development information of search engine technologies, specific examples of companies who have failed to successfully deploy ERP systems, and pricing-level information on software companies is not provided.

Links from the site that are helpful

The links within columns, blogs and articles are of the most value as they provide additional insights into the topics of interest by the majority of readers. Both sites have specific requirements for links to deliver significant value to the content produced.

Additional Notes Regarding the Site

The variation in graphical approach to both sites is significant and worth looking at. The Business Intelligence Network is organized more for the line-of-business executive who is interested in learning more about how it developments will impact strategies. The eweek.com site is built for the more technologically-savvy who specifically want to drill down into the latest stories of interest.

Line Evaluation

Both sites are excellent, and both sites des4rved to be bookmarked and regularly visited during the week to see what's new in it and to become current and an expert in a field of interest.