If you are in the process of evaluating your current customer intelligence infrastructure, you will need to consider whether you are investing in an analysis application or analytic infrastructure for your business. Your timeline for investing in these solutions may also be affected. Some of these trends may also help sort out the hype that you've been hearing from marketing and sales presentations. If you're hearing that you only need a solution that can provide metrics and reports, you may want to do some research in how these solutions fully address some of the more difficult issues underlying your business and customer intelligence systems performance. Just because you're working in an e-business doesn't mean that you have to reinvent the wheel of analysis.
Analysis is a learning process.
It builds on what you've done and learned before. Sometimes the obvious is mostly pragmatic. Like any facet of business, incorporating analytic technologies into the planning, management, and operations of your business is a learning process. You may find that, at this time, taking full advantage of sophisticated reporting and a few key metrics is the most important focus for your business. Either way, your company must be ready to take advantage of the technology before you can reasonably implement it.