WHAT DOES BI DO?
BI assists in strategic and operational decision making. A Gartner survey ranked the strategic use
of BI in the following order [Willen, 2002]:
1. Corporate performance management
2. Optimizing customer relations, monitoring business activity, and traditional decision
support
3. Packaged standalone BI applications for specific operations or strategies
4. Management reporting of business intelligence
One implication of this ranking is that merely reporting the performance of a firm and its
competitors, which is the strength of many existing software packages, is not enough. A second
implication is that too many firms still view business intelligence (like DSS and EIS before it) as
an inward looking function.
Business intelligence is a natural outgrowth of a series of previous systems designed to support
decision making. The emergence of the data warehouse as a repository, the advances in data
cleansing that lead to a single truth, the greater capabilities of hardware and software, and the
boom of Internet technologies that provided the prevalent user interface all combine to create a
richer business intelligence environment than was available previously. BI pulls information from
many other systems. Figure 2 depicts some of the information systems that are used by BI.