Business Intelligence is high on the agendas of modern executives.

At the 2014 Gartner Business Intelligence & Analytics Summit, Gartner Analyst Michael Smith reported that a survey of CEOs and Senior Business Executives in North America showed that their two top technology investment focus areas were:

Business Analytics (71%)

Enhanced Business Reporting (56%)

There can be a number of different factors driving executives to make investments in Business Intelligence, but one main reason stands out.

According to Smith, executives still report a huge gap between the information they need and the information they get.

They get the results -- the data that looks into the past without allowing them to understand what in their internal processes and external environment they need to focus on to improve for the future.

The data they get describes what happened.

But it doesn’t predict what will happen.

And it doesn’t prescribe which actions to take.

In most cases, data is already being registered and logged through decentralized transactional systems such as the ERP solution or the CRM, marketing, or warehousing solutions.

Information is managed by each functional area, but it may be siloed and not accessible for executives to understand right away.

And it may not allow for analysis across the diverse transactional solutions within the company.

This requires a dedicated setup that is built for analytics.

But how do you differentiate which data is most valuable for you to use?