Enabling Pervasive Business Intelligence

Mark Conway, Dan Blankenship, and Jamie Delgado for Dell Power Solutions,/p>

Today, organizations are constantly contending with increased volatility, complexity, and demands for transparency and performance — and to keep up, they must be armed with timely, accurate information. That reality has put the spotlight on business intelligence (BI) and the analysis of data to support decision making.

BI has been a top priority at many companies for years, offering a key way for senior executives to gain fast, high-quality insights into performance and operations. But the need for such analytics driven insights has been growing at other levels of the enterprise as well. As a result, there has been a growing interest in "pervasive BI" — the use of BI tools to share and analyze information throughout an organization. The idea is to glean insights from the vast amounts of data flowing through the organization, and then use them to drive predictions, decisions, and actions from the executive suite to the front line.