Business Intelligence for the Micro-ISV Using Spreadsheets to Support Decision Making

To some, business intelligence (BI) is a buzzword used in management circles to garner support for an IT project. To others, it may sound like a dressed-up way of saying data mining. BI is neither a product nor a system, but it is a method of collecting data from various sources and turning it into actionable information [4]. BI projects typically implement a decision-support system (DSS) that helps managers make decisions based on facts instead of relying on intuition. Even though full scale BI projects are usually associated with larger organizations who need to use IT systems to effectively communicate cross-functional information, even small businesses can take advantage of some of these BI techniques.