Business intelligence means many things to different people, but running through everyone's definition is the analysis of enterprise information with the goal of making better business decisions. That's always been the aim of business decision makers, and business intelligence technology has made that objective more attainable than ever before, making people more productive than ever. "There's just no downside to using this stuff," says Cerner Corporation CIO Rich Miller. Business intelligence has been with us as a business tool for a while — and has improved considerably over the years — but there are some new trends that have recently made major changes in how the technology works and who uses it. The first is that today's decision making happens very quickly and needs to rely on information about what is happening at the very moment the decision is to be made. "Business intelligence has to happen in real time," says Laura DiSciullo, director of contact center product management for Avaya, "because we're making a decision about someone at the other end of a phone call, not someone we're meeting with next week."
展开▼
