No longer does business intelligence belong to rarefied analysts closed off in a room. Best-in-class organizations use today's data to make today's decisions and give their frontline employees the tools to do that.

2007 was the year of BI vendor megamergers. So what's next? What will 2008 mean to business intelligence? Here are five predictions for the year ahead—and one wild card to watch.

1. IT-business teamwork will be crucial.

The business intelligence landscape is changing rapidly—more and different types of data, new tools, frenetic M&A activity—and in this rapidly evolving world, communication between IT and the business side is key, says Colin White of BI Research.

Defining the core values that you want to use to measure business performance, your key performance indicators (KPI), will remain paramount. These values are not about the technology, they are about what's core to your business.

IT's understanding of business needs and communication around technology will become even more important as some types of BI tools become easier for non-IT folks to implement, and as the types of data used in BI change.

Last word: In order for BI to help you gain competitive advantage, IT needs to deeply understand the business case for BI—what performance indicators it should measure and how, how employees actually work, how BI tools will fit into those patterns and so on.

2. Operational business intelligence will lead the way.

For many companies, business intelligence has been successful in its traditional strategic and tactical use, says BI Research's Colin White. Studying historic data can yield valuable insights on what approaches are working and which need to be changed. But looking at what happened two months ago does nothing to help you save a customer you've already lost, nor does it help you recognize a customer's receptivity to buying more products at checkout time. So the drive to extend actionable business intelligence to a broader audience—frontline employees and even customers and partners—will continue in 2008, putting the spotlight on operational business tools.

Operational BI can automate operational data collection and integration; it can also report and alert creation and certain decisions or actions. For example, operational BI tools can recognize customer inactivity and automatically generate an alert to be sent to an account manager.