Making Business Intelligence More Useful

Business intelligence has long offered the promise of letting companies gather, store, access, and analyze huge amounts of data so that they can make better decisions regarding customers, suppliers, employees, logistics, and infrastructure. BI systems frequently have been unable to get results to users in a timely manner because of component and data-integration problems. New service-oriented-architecture tools provide interfaces to various data types, which helps integrate data sources so that multiple applications can read them. BI's new real-time capabilities can even make it easier for companies to work directly with customers. A customer might be on the phone or an e-commerce Web site for only few minutes, which limits the time and amount of information a company has to make sales-related decisions