Business intelligence (BI) has traditionally been viewed in the context of strategic decision-making - a solution that provides senior and executive management with insight into organizational performance and enables strategic decisions. As a result, the audience for BI in most companies has been limited to the top few rungs of the organizational hierarchy. To a lesser extent, BI applications have been created to enable middle management to track performance indicators at a tactical level. Relatively, the use of BI to support operational functions has been limited. It has been mostly individual initiatives addressed at solving very specific problems, rather than as a part of the enterprise IT strategy. In other words, BI has yet to establish itself as an enterprise-wide solution.
