Of course, plenty of cutting-edge companies have already blended business intelligence with decision systems without the aid or application or process management vendors. In a "CTO Exchange on Pervasive BI" at last week's Microstrategy World Conference in Miami, top executives from Informatica, Teradata and Microstrategy observed that leading firms have embedded BI to drive inbound and outbound cross selling, point-of-sale fraud detection, automated insurance claims triage, personalized offers from ATMs and POS devices and real-time manufacturing quality alerts, to name just a few applications.
"What we're calling Pervasive BI is much more than just presenting operational data or a dashboard. It's really about integrating information into decisioning processes through decisioning services," said Stephen Brobst, CTO at Teradata and co-author, along with CTOs Jeff Bedell of MicroStrategy and James Markarian of Informatica, of the white paper "Critical Success Factors Deploying Pervasive BI."
 John Hagerty, AMR Research |
Whether "performance management" or "business optimization" or "enterprise decision management" ends up being the term that sticks, the idea is getting to a better bottom line, said Hagerty of AMR. "If companies can get to an environment in which they can understand what drives their business, they'll want it pervasively throughout the company," he said. "Pervasive means it's available to everybody, in a format that makes sense to each user and delivered to people as part of what they do without having to think about it."