The insight of Business Intelligence is still analysis in hindsight and better compared to static reporting. Performance Management is the process through which a corporation evolves in its quest to reach the holy grail of Financial and Operational excellence.

While I hate to call Business Intelligence - "tools", the BI industry has evolved striving to achieve the prettiest picture and the most interactive frames on a page with the promise of insight and achieving the "ah ha" moment.   This has eluded most analysts using Business Intelligence.  Analysts are unable to discern what data is the "right" data and put that data into a relational context to better understand what it is telling them or should be telling them.  A key reason for the inability to isolate the essential data upon which to make insightful business decisions is that most of the relevant data needs to come from outside the corporation.  Internal data supports current marketing and operational thought and previous decisions and is less likely to isolate new metrics for future or real-time decision-making.  There are too many people speculating on how the economy should be acting and too few people leading the economy onto a healthy plateau. The contextual data analysis that is needed will yield business insight with the ephemeral customer behavior regardless of whether the transaction is internal or external to the corporation.  The cogent questions should be, "What was the thought process that initiated the transaction and how do we replicate it - in real-time?"

If a corporation maintains a steady course of action based on a historical context in this economy, they will fall to the recession rather than rise ahead of its recovery.  If, as the government would like us to believe, the recession is over and we are on our way to recovery, the best use of traditional Business Intelligence techniques are to capture buying signals, not buying behavior.  Buying behavior moving forward is based on a different chemistry of values than history dictates.  Our workforce has changed, our demand for quality has increased and the expectation of a reasonable price has been tempered.  The decision criterion that is a return on value is paramount and price elasticity is very sensitive.  If we are to achieve Financial Intelligence and a high level of Operational performance, we must be able to isolate the characteristics of the external market that are driving business growth in this unsettled economy. 

To exceed our own expectations of growth and use the rudimentary tools available today, the Finance department and the Marketing department have to work together.  The cost of Marketing becomes a considerable expense of gaining marketshare.  Using third party data or extensive market research efforts, the corporation has to learn the behavior and influence the future behavior of their market.  Together they have to identify an acceptable level of margin and build a fewer range of products while still addressing the targeted population.  Financial Intelligence is about understanding cost drivers and being able to make slight financial corrections based on operational performance; a more dynamic entity than most Finance departments today.  This results in a much more interactive way to look at the business while being able to use the Business Intelligence and Performance Management systems to drive Financial and Operational excellence.