...seamlessly integrate islands of data while eliminating traditionally labor-intensive efforts to find the right bit of information to truly understand what business decisions must be made. "We're trying to provide our business people with information at their fingertips. We want to get out of the business of doing repetitive things," said Balter. "We're trying to personalize [business intelligence], so instead of them having to weed through every report, they'll have different responsibilities within their department. [Brian Fonseca, InfoWorld]

Good blurb on the need to bring quantitative and qualitative together in support of better corporate performance. One technology to help make this happen from a user interface perspective is the portal. Other components include data warehouse, OLAP, and enterprise content management (unstructured data warehouse).

Henry Morris of research group IDC says that business intelligence of the variety delivered by CleverPath should be integrated with business processes for greatest efficiency. "If you were running a marketing campaign, you would ... track the results of delivering messages to your customers, then you would analyze the results; the collaborative part would be that you would possibly make some adjustments in the way you ran the campaign," he says, giving an example. Morris adds that a purchasing agent could also use business intelligence to analyze supplier performance, and, on that basis, enter into negotiations with suppliers, potentially via portals.