E-Intelligence

As corporations move rapidly toward deploying e-business systems, the lack of business intelligence facilities in these systems prevents decisionmakers from exploiting the full potential of the Internet as a sales, marketing, and support channel. To solve this problem, vendors are rapidly enhancing their business intelligence offerings to capture the data flowing through e-business systems and integrate it with the information that traditional decision-making systems manage and analyze. These enhanced business intelligence—or e-intelligence—systems may provide significant business benefits to traditional brick-and-mortar companies as well as new dot-com ones as they build e-business environments.

Organizations have been successfully using decision processing products, including data warehouse and business intelligence tools, for the past several years to optimize day-to-day business operations and to leverage enterprise-wide corporate data for a competitive advantage. The advent of the Internet and corporate extranets has propelled many of these organizations toward the use of ebusiness applications to further improve business efficiency, decrease costs and increase revenues - and to compete with new dot.com companies appearing in the marketplace.

The explosive growth in the use of e-business has led to the need for decision-processing systems to be enhanced to capture and integrate business information flowing through e-business systems. These systems also need to be able to apply business intelligence techniques to this captured-business information. These enhanced decision processing systems, or E-Intelligence, have the potential to provide significant business benefits to both traditional bricks-and-mortar companies and new dot.com companies as they begin to exploit the power of e-business processing.