CIO Wisdom II: More Best Practices

Definitions

No doubt you have come across numerous definitions for the term business intelligence. The business intelligence definition I have always preferred and used goes as follows:

The pursuit of timely, actionable, high-value insight.

Each of three descriptors in the above phrase—timely, actionable, and high-value—is equally important regardless of what our specific objectives might be. If the sought-after insight isn't timely, it is of marginal use at best, perhaps even useless. Similarly, very timely low-value insight isn't likely to be of much use nor worth the cost of building a complex system, either.

Then we have the word in the middle—actionable—that provides a nice segue into the body of the material in this chapter. Anyone who ...