Business Intelligence enables your organization to track, understand, and manage your business in order to maximize enterprise performance. With BI, organizations are able to improve operational efficiency, build profitable customer relationships, and develop differentiated product offerings.

This case study reviews the challenges faced by Huntsman Corporation and the processes that led to the selection of Cognos as the BI platform of choice for the company. By standardizing its financial close process on IBM Cognos TM1, Huntsman Corporation reduced audit fees, avoided headcount additions, improved productivity, and created an enterprisewide analytics platform.

To compete in an ever-changing market, enterprises need to provide database-driven insight for employees, not only hindsight for decision makers. Enterprise data warehouses based on historical information fail to deal with “Fresh data”, giving rise to the newest wave in database-driven insight - Pervasive Business Intelligence (PBI).

In this last of a 3-part series on analytics, Thomas Davenport, President's Distinguished professor of IT at Babson College, talks about trends that are shaping business intelligence and analytics, and how it is impacting the competitiveness of enterprises.

Fountain Set (Holdings) Limited, manufacturer of knitted fabrics, has selected QlikView for its business information management. 

IBM launched IBM Cognos Express, an all-in-one business intelligence and planning solution for Hong Kong large enterprises

Carl Rajendram is CEO of ISM Insurance Services Malaysia, a shared service provider for insurance and Takaful (Islamic insurance market in Malaysia). Critical to the business' success is timely access to its database. In this video he describes some of the challenges ISM faces in meeting the needs of the local insurance community.

David Hughes, vice president of Asia pacific for SAS, argues that business intelligence can only help you understand the past and present. It cannot help you predict with credible certainty what the future will be. This is the challenge many companies face - to accurately predict what the market will want to buy in an undefined future. According to Hughes, business analytics was created to answer this need.