And in real time if need be.

Previous implementations of business intelligence (BI) solutions, justified suspicion about new claims, the entrenchment of spreadsheets and a lack of executive buy-in aren't helping BI's adoption.

Today's CEOs are harassed individuals. Demands from shareholders, business partners, staff and the board often make it an unenviable job. But what if they could get an instant bird's eye view of the state of their businesses on their computer desktop? That has been the promise of business intelligence since 1989. The term, coined by a Gartner analyst, encompasses all decision-based information systems. As with many technologies, some parts of BI work brilliantly, some parts are probably an impossible dream to all but those secretly building them, and the rest would work just fine if the older versions already installed could be ripped out tomorrow and started from scratch.