Multiple versions of the truth. Interdepartmental meetings frequently turn into shouting matches as participants argue about whose spreadsheet has the correct figures.

Inability to perform in-depth analysis. Your company knows which of its retail outlets have the greatest sales volume, but it doesn’t know which products have the highest sales.

Unable to locate important information. Fred in accounting mentioned that a report showing year-over-year growth for each customer has been posted to the company’s intranet. However, you have no idea how to find it.

Need for simple-to-use production reporting technology. Your accounting department uses a word processor to generate customer invoices. Customers frequently complain about being invoiced twice for the same purchase or shipment.

Existing BI technology is too difficult to use. Your company’s sales manager used analysis tools at her former job that she insisted be used in your company as well. Although your company has invested in several licenses, users that have tried to use these tools have given up in frustration and rely exclusively on spreadsheets instead.

Minor problems seem to get the same attention as major ones. While all problems need to ultimately be addressed, you should be able to identify which ones need immediate attention. Oftentimes, you can only identify projects that are behind schedule or departments that are over-budget after they are deeply in trouble.

Operations not aligned with strategic goals. Although your company has defined its strategic goals you are not sure if they are in tune with its daily operations. Several managers have told you that while they know how to optimize the work of their own departments, they would like to better understand how their efforts support the overall goals of the organization.

Inability to comply with government reporting requirements. While your company is still relatively young, it hopes to one day go public. In your role as IT director, you want to take steps now to provide proper audit trails and data lineage to ensure that your CEO and CFO have confidence in the accuracy.

A major part of any manager’s job is to make decisions. If you can improve the overall quality of your organization’s decision-making process, you’ll improve the overall effectiveness of your organization. Business intelligence will help your organization make better decisions. Because of this, BI was initially referred to as a decision support system.

BI allows business users to analyze and better understand their organization’s plans and results. It provides insight into what’s working correctly while identifying potential problem areas in time for corrective actions to be taken. It can be used to recognize opportunities as well as problems, and alert your organization to potential issues when exception conditions occur—such as sales dropping 20% below forecast or inventory falling below a threshold value.

Since BI product suites include a variety of components, organizations can pick those that are most appropriate for the task at hand and for the experience level of their individual employees. While in the past, only technical specialists typically used BI tools, most business people can now successfully use them as well. This has served to democratize BI usage throughout organizations. The role of IT has positively evolved from one of digging out from its historic report request backlog to one of monitoring and administrating BI usage, and setting the appropriate controls relative to who can access what data. BI technology has truly brought “(analytical) power to the (business) people.” This BI self-sufficiency has provided business users with quicker response time and the ability to drill down and perform interactive analysis while enabling IT to more effectively and more efficiently serve its organizations.

While many managers and supervisors pride themselves on their intuition, BI provides tools to help verify their insights and even discover new ones. It permits business users to explore results at a high level and then drill down to analyze the underlying details. Business intelligence is one of the primary keys to effective decision-making.