JUSTIFICATION AND BENEFITS OF ADOPTING A BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE ENVIRONMENT

The amount of business data is increasing exponentially, it practically doubles every two to three years. More information means more competition. In the age of the information explosion, executives, managers and workers all need to be able to make better decisions faster. Because now, more than ever, time is money. Business managers eventually discovered that raw data are rarely of any benefit, and that their real value depends on an organization's ability to analyze them. Hence, the need emerged for software systems capable of retrieving, summarizing, and interpreting data for end-users. Business intelligence is about making better decisions easier and making them more quickly. This paper also covers the following topics: the importance of developing a business justification and a business strategy for BI decision-support initiatives; business drivers and strategic business goals, as the motivating forces behind every BI project; the use of cost-benefit analyses to demonstrate how a return on investment (ROI) can be achieved.