Successful Business Intelligence solutions enable a business to gain insight into its business results and its customers to quickly realize a return on investment. A key ingredient for that success is to turning operational data into information that is timely, accurate, and easy to understand. I-Way employees IBM Start Now Business Intelligence Solutions in order to foster informed marketing decisions by delivering timely and accurate information to the business decision makers.

Intelligence is defined as: The process of solving business problems through the discovery of information and insight from data. This is accomplished through data management and the analysis of relationships among data and then using derived information to drive timely and effective business decisions. Daily transactional information is collected from an existing e-commerce or CRM website and is known as operational data. Businesses collect large quantities of information in day-to-day operations such as data about orders, accounts payable, e-commerce transactions, inventory, and customers. In addition, businesses often acquire data, such as demographics and mailing lists, from outside sources. Most businesses do not want to give access to their operational data, either for security or for performance reasons. They prefer to use a separate database for a Business Intelligence Solution.

To build this database, tools are needed to extract, cleanse, and transform data from source data, which may be on a variety of hardware platforms, using a variety of databases. Once the data is prepared for Business Intelligence analysis, the data is stored in a subject-oriented database and must be refreshed and managed. This database is called a data mart or data warehouse.

Business Intelligence refers to the ability to make better business decisions through intelligent use of production data assets. It is about giving access to the right data, analyzing the data for insights, and using the insights to make better decisions. The ability to centralize and analyze this for better business decisions can often lead to getting ahead of the competition.

• Respond to customers' needs quickly and efficiently
• Realize additional sales opportunities by cross-selling and up-selling
• Shorten sales cycles
• Enhance asset and liability management
• Promote and increase customer loyalty
• Gain a competitive edge with data consolidation and analysis