These organizations risk becoming the equivalents of the cave dwellers who grew fearful or ecstatic based on woefully unreliable information. Most important, these companies will be vulnerable to losing their way because they'll be in the shadows about exactly who their customers are, what their markets really want, how customers actually behave, and whether the enterprise and its value chain are meeting that market with the greatest possible effectiveness. These organizations will be making decisions based on shadows. And, in a marketplace where a razor-thin margin can define leadership, and even survival, that's risky. The second touchpoint is that enterprises need a vision of how they and the players in their value chains can evolve the collective learning that will reward them with market leadership.
Business intelligence takes a lot more than buying applications.
More than having a consultant come in for a few weeks. Done right, business intelligence requires an enterprise's serious commitment to the heavy lifting of creating deep knowledge about itself, its markets, and the other enterprises with which it collaborates to get to market. If a company is in textiles, that commercial cycle may extend from the sheep to the sweater and every significant point between the wool leaving the angora to the garment being hung in your customer's closet. Being precisely attuned to the market equals competitiveness. Ideally, business intelligence integrates the technologies, processes, and analytical methods that cause crucial trends and patterns to emerge from the volumes of data that every enterprise and value chain creates.