Beyond all disputes related to BI tools implementation success or failure, beyond the discussions about how flexible or inflexible is a BI solution, one thing can be certainty stated: business intelligence can do a lot of great things for organisations.
First of all, such an analytic tool will stir data from disparate sources, allowing connections to be made between different, but related, areas and transparently monitor business unit achievement. Second, it will give insights as to how customers are behaving and how they react to corporate initiatives and it will measure the efficacy of business initiatives. And third, it will provide indications of future trends and not guarantees.
Most of these things is internally focussed, about the organisation itself and only tangentially related to the external environment in which it is operating. However, few companies are incorporating macroeconomic trends into their BI systems, and that because Business Intelligence is not really in the business of predicting overall economic trends. Any BI tool was created to work well for a company. Because a nationwide Business Intelligence would be a giant task, who must have to aggregate data across thousands of companies and deal with thousands of data definitions and calculation methodologies. Which is essentially impossible. Therefore, to seek macroeconomic benefits by using a BI solutions is an utopia, at least at this point.
