Business Intelligence is used to describe many different types of IT solutions – data warehouse applications, information portal application, executive dashboards, operational trending and dashboards, exception reporting, and data trending.

The key aspect to business intelligence is the aspect of your business that you want to report progress – your business metrics. These metrics will be different throughout an organization depending on its focus and also the level within the organization. A key strategy is to align the reporting metrics from the highest level of the business metrics to the lower levels throughout an organization.

For example – if customer satisfaction is a key performance indicator, then the metrics throughout the customer service organization as well as the product quality organization should be aligned to the different aspects of customer satisfaction – e.g. customer response time, product quality complaints could be different goals within the organization.

Another example may be within a quality organization – lot testing cycle time, number of retests, deviation percentage, amount of testing per lot, and certificate of analysis cycle time could all be measurements within the quality organization.