Trends & Controversies

Business Intelligence (BI), a term coined in 1989, has gained much traction in the IT practitioner community and academia over the past two decades. According to Wikipedia, BI refers to the "skills, technologies, applications, and practices used to support decision making" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_intelligence). On the basis of a survey of 1,400 CEOs, the Gartner Group projected BI revenue to reach US$3 billion in 2009. Through BI initiatives, businesses are gaining insights from the growing volumes of transaction, product, inventory, customer, competitor, and industry data generated by enterprise-wide applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), supply-chain management (SCM), knowledge management, collaborative computing, Web analytics, and so on. The same Gartner survey also showed that BI surpassed security as the top business IT priority in 2006.