Overview

Imagine that you are the sales manager for a large retail organization and that you were able, within some probability, to predict how much money each of your customers was going to spend and which products each was going to purchase over the next six months. Or, as the productivity manager, imagine that you could figure out which production teams within your organization build the highest quality products. Or imagine that, as the broker negotiating electricity generation and delivery contracts for a region of the country, you were able to predict with relative accuracy what the demand for electricity would be for the next 90 days.

Or imagine that you are in charge of managing your company's supply chain and that you could determine which of your vendors provides the highest-quality products the quickest. Or let's say you are the customer retention manager for a credit card company and you can identify customers about to cut up their credit card a month before they do so. I am sure you would agree that each of these people is in an enviable position, because each has special knowledge about a business situation that conveys some business advantage. These are just a few examples of the kind of knowledge that can be exposed and exploited through the use of business intelligence (BI).

In the last few years, the ability to create, collect, and store information has widely outpaced our ability to make significant use of that information. Yet there is significant...