Business Intelligence Gets Smarter

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To avoid those costs, companies can build business intelligence into their logistics planning systems that lets them know when trucks are stacking up and directs supervisors in the warehouse to load the trucks that charge waiting fees before those that don't. The supervisors get this information via their PCs or handhelds on the warehouse floor. "People are getting the benefit of a data warehouse without knowing it," says Randy Lea, vice-president for product and services marketing at Teradata, a division of NCR (NCR), a leader in data warehousing software.

This kind of real-time, behind-the-curtains intelligence is even becoming available to end customers. Travelocity, one of the leading travel Web sites, has long used business intelligence software to help it analyze buying trends and segment customer types so new services can be tailored for them. Now it has rigged its vast data warehouse directly to its consumer Web site so it can gather and analyze information about what's going on as it's happening.

COMPUTER INTUITION.

Travelocity links the profile of individual customers who are on the site to a monitor of their current activity and to information about available airplane flights, rental cars, and vacation packages. If a customer begins asking about flights to Orlando over the 4th of July weekend, Travelocity's system will understand that the customer is probably planning a family vacation and will place advertisements that are relevant to that kind of trip and even pitch the customer special travel promotions. "If we want to, we could give every customer a custom offer," says Mark Hooper, Travelocity's vice-president for product development.

What's next in easy-to-use business intelligence? Gartner has a concept it calls "Biggle" -- the intersection of BI and Google. The idea is that the data warehousing software will be so sophisticated that it understands when different people use different words to describe the same concepts or products. It creates an index of related information -- á là Google -- and dishes relevant results out in response to queries.

In computer science, they refer to this capability as non-obvious relationship awareness. "Nobody's doing this yet," says Gartner's Beyer. Judging from the speed of recent advances in business intelligence, though, it may not be long before companies add the term "Biggling" to their tech lexicon.

Hamm is a senior writer for BusinessWeek in New York.