I like the old word decision support, since it articulates the true essence of the goal of BI: to support decision making.

And maybe BI should be connected to decision management more. BI stops where decision management begins: improving and automating decisions to drive business performance. Business rules engines play a key role in this area.

I couldn’t agree more with the proposition that information management is a significant part of what I know as business intelligence, and the more significant the organisation and its information assets, the more important information maangement becomes.

However, BI occurs in every successful organisation (and some unsuccessful ones as well I imagine). BI is all about making decisions! Decision makers have made, and will continue to make, decisions without the need for such things as spreadsheets, cubes or reporting engines.

Can an organisation improve their decision making ability by adopting “BI”? It depends on the problems they encounter in their current decision making processes - no problems, no need to improve. (I would define “problems” to include market place competition.)

The other perspective I think is important in this discussion is that BI has a stronger technical aspect to it than IM. I would argue that in an organisation where IM prevails, there are still many technical aspects that need to be considered to meet the organisation’s needs. For example, to meet the stakeholder’s (user’s)requirements, you may need to implement one or more or all of the following: cubes, scorecards, statistical analysis solutions, data visualisation solutions, analytical applications and/or notification services. All of these should be built on a solid IM foundation, but their implementation is firmly in the BI space.
To para-phrase Mark Twain … the rumours of BI’s death are greatly exggerated!

What I found really interesting in your blog was the sentence: “The real intelligence (or magic) happens when end users start to interact with the information we provide for them”.

And this is exactly the way it is, with BI we don’t deliver intelligence but information! That is why the scope of BI should be more than just a technical trick: to keep your promiss of creating intelligence, you need people to combine the information that the tools can provide with their current knowledge and experience. Intelligence is knowledge in action, something that just the technical side of BI can’t do.

My point in this: if you want to keep calling our discipline Business Intelligence, we should broaden the scope. Or start calling it Business Information…

Ps: Check for definitions of intelligence Rothberg & Erickson (2005) and Liebowitz (1999).