develop more selective and effective ways to reach and acquire new customers and/or expand business with current profitable customers.

driving the use of BI into the core business processes and decisions that determine business results. Business-centric methods go beyond traditional approaches by putting rigor into defining the business value capture mechanism for each BI project.

cannot easily be matched by its competitors, delivering a competitive advantage. Dell and Cisco are excellent examples of stage 4 companies. Both aligned people, processes, and technology so that they could outperform their competitors on cost, quality, and service.

aligning its BI program with strategic objectives and processes, by planning for cultural change, by assessing its BI readiness, and by using effective IT governance mechanisms, Company B ensures that it will get the most from its BI investment almost regardless of the specific BI technologies it chooses to implement.

Packaged analytical applications, which combine vendor-defined subsets of business information with one or more structured approaches to analyzing the information. Typical packaged analytical applications include scorecards, dashboards, customer analytics, and supply chain analytics.

dedicated technical specialists who have general expertise in techniques that are needed to successfully design and implement the BI environment.

The incoming source data is typically very detailed and is often referred to as “atomic-level data.”

Instead, the platform provides an integrated suite of IT tools that can be used to design, develop, and implement a customized IT capability that supports the business.

Having had a variety of experiences with a variety of executives and managers, we have concluded that better, more structured approaches to determining BI opportunities are needed, and we developed the BI opportunity analysis framework systematically to identify BI opportunities and prioritize them based on business impact and risk.