Chapter 1 The Business Value of Business Intelligence

“The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.”

—Milton Friedman, Nobel laureate economist

The past decade has witnessed an arms race in American business: a wholesale deployment of information technology (IT) to the point at which some experts estimate that half of capital spending by business is invested in IT. The growth of companies such as SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Dell, and Siebel—and their consulting company partners—attests to the magnitude of this race.

Most of that investment has been in what amounts to better plumbing, better systems for managing day-to-day operations, and more frequent and voluminous reports. There is little debate that these investments ...

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