A  few years ago at the first Tech/Plant Summit, I was asked: “What do you see as the next major advancement in IT for our industry?” My answer was, “Web-based dashboards.” While the terms have evolved over time from key performance indexes, to balanced scorecards, dashboards and company portals, the latest moniker—‘Business Intelligence,’ encompasses all of these concepts.
 
Business intelligence (BI) is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing and providing access to data to help enterprise users make better business decisions.
 
Although BI as a concept traces its roots ...