This was in response to a post on linkedin  regarding the usage of business intelligence.

Traditional business intelligence on its own is nice. It lets you know what you have done as a business, and a little bit on where you could be doing in the future. I 100% agree with the other posters about MDM/governance and stewardship as essential enablers to efficent BI by the way. As other posters have intimated, this can be of significant value in making decisons.

However, how much impact these decisions have on the bottom line cannot often be measured, particularly within the typical ‘reporting tool’ environment that is normally seen in conjunction with business intelligence. These decisions are also typically tactical – which company to sell to – or strategic – which market to enter, which is only a small part of the scope of decisions made in the organisation.

 To make the most of the information and analytics you have to hand, operational intelligence and operational decision making needs to be integrated to either automate or suggest the decisions made by customer-facing people, and crucially record the effectiveness of this decision so that the model/parameters it is made based on can be adjusted. Without this closing of the loop and the positive feedback, the power of the information in the organisation (and outside) isn’t being used valuably.

Suggest you have a look at James Taylor on the website attached who is evangelistic about this sort of stuff. Links: http://www.smartenoughsystems.com