At Delta Sonic, for example, business executives wanted a better idea of what was—or wasn’t—driving sales so that strategic business decisions were no longer a case of trial and error. Executives at Clif Bar, a $480 million manufacturer of nutrition and snack bars, began considering BI after its two largest competitors were acquired by multibillion-dollar global corporations. Blue Mountain Ski Resort got into BI after an investment company bought it and planned to more than double its size by investing nearly $1 billion into the business over five years. And the midsize financial services firm JBHanauer saw BI as a key to its survival as it watched other mid-market financial institutions go out of business or get bought by the large financial houses. "We’re one of the last surviving middle players," says Charlene Barnes, CIO and executive vice president. BI, she says, "is strategic to keeping us alive."

Given the competitive environment in which today’s companies operate, BI and data warehousing consistently top the CIO’s list of planned spending priorities, according to a July 2006 survey of CIOs by Merrill Lynch. "Organizations of all sizes are struggling with very similar problems," says Aberdeen’s Belkin.

Companies are also creating more and more data. Netezza’s Baum says his clients’ data doubles every year. And with more customer data coming in from e-commerce activities, and technologies such as RFID providing more specific data on individual consumers, companies have information mountains to mine for what drives sales.

For mid-market organizations, using an Excel spreadsheet to inform strategic business decisions just isn’t cutting it anymore.

Getting Business Buy-In

BI can be complicated and expensive. So for mid-market companies, with smaller IT budgets and staffs, convincing the business to invest in a BI application can be daunting.

That’s why John Gowers, director of IT for Blue Mountain Ski Resort, says one of the most important steps in convincing the business to embrace BI is to start off with a relatively small investment, show a return and then expand the program from there. It’s the plan he followed when 50 percent of the ski resort was purchased by Intrawest in 1999. (The Fortress Investment Group purchased the resort in 2006.)

Blue Mountain has multiple lines of business, from hospitality services to retail to equipment rental. Intrawest’s ambitious plan for Blue Mountain included raising the number of skiers visiting the resort on an annual basis from 300,000 to 700,000, increasing lodging units from 200 to 1,400 and taking the number of restaurants and boutiques from a handful to as many as 70. To manage that kind of growth and complexity, Gowers knew he needed BI applications to collect some basic information to manage the company’s revenue and investments. He wanted to help the business determine which investments were yielding acceptable rates of return, how sales of certain products and services affected the sales of others at the resort and how to manage an expanding inventory of capital, including equipment and accommodations.