Companies are drowning in the sea of information they collect about customers,
competitors and the global landscape. Much of this data is fragmented, collected
from a variety of sources in inconsistent formats and stored away in separate
departmental databases. Gathering internal information is challenging enough,
but then extracting it from operational systems, structuring it in a separate
analytical system and turning it into useful business intelligence is a slow grind
for many firms. Add to that the growing desire to mine the web for intelligence
on competitors and customers, and the business intelligence (BI) task becomes
daunting to say the least.