In today's competitive and highly dynamic environment, analyzing data to understand how the business is performing and to predict outcomes and trends has become critical. The traditional approach to reporting is no longer adequate, users now demand easy-to-use intelligent platforms and applications capable of analyzing real-time data to provide insight and actionable information at the right time. The end goal is to support better and timelier decision making, enabled by the availability of up-to-date, high quality information.

Although there has been progress in this direction and many companies are introducing products towards meeting this goal, there is still a long way to go. In particular, the whole lifecycle of business intelligence requires new techniques and methodologies capable of dealing with the new requirements imposed by the new generation of BI applications. From the capturing of real-time business data to the transformation and delivery of actionable information, all the stages of the Business Intelligence (BI) cycle call for new algorithms and paradigms as the basis of new functionalities including dynamic integration of real-time data feeds from operational sources, optimization and evolution of ETL transformations and analytical models, and dynamic generation of adaptive real-time dashboards, just to name a few.

The series of BIRTE workshops, starting in 2006 and always held in conjunction with VLDB, aims to provide a forum to discuss topics related to this emerging field and set research directions towards making business intelligence more real-time. Following the success of previous BIRTE editions (2006, 2008-2011) submissions for research, industrial and position papers on relevant topics are encouraged.