Business Intelligence Is Not An Oxymoron - CIOs Uncensored Blog - InformationWeek

I'm a little tardy picking this one up...

http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/07/business_intell_2.html?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_ALL

... but I love stories like this. BI is very much a productivity exercise.  In this case it's more about productivity than it is about business insight and performance.

"district managers, who typically run eight to 12 restaurants, were spending as much as two hours every morning going through e-mails, voice mails, spreadsheets, etc. 'They'd spend a significant amount of time getting that [data] together,' Valle says, 'and then another half hour doing something with it.'"

That final statement is notable. "doing something about it". In this case acting on insight is a focal point. More of a focal point than gathering and understand the data to any level of scientific detail.

Implementing productivity as infrastructure gives us the flexibility to "do the BI" and then "do the collaboration".

It's a shame they're using Cognos, but hey, at least they have SQL at the back-end :)

Business Intelligence Is Not An Oxymoron - CIOs Uncensored Blog - InformationWeek