Fortunately for TruServ, the company had business intelligence (BI) software that helped it recognize the gopher fiasco early enough to liquidate the unwanted rodents and recoup some of its expenses. That ability to quickly make sense of oceans of data can be a competitive advantage, making BI software essential for many companies.

CIOs are hardly flush with cash these days, but they are interested in BI—very interested. A 2003 Forrester Research report found that 45 percent of companies surveyed planned to shop for BI software this year, which explains why vendors such as Business Objects and Cognos have seen double-digit increases in their revenue. With today’s BI tools, business folks can jump in and start slicing and dicing data themselves, rather than wait for IT to run complex reports. This democratization of information access helps users back up with hard numbers business decisions that would otherwise be based only on "gut feelings."

A broad range of applications for BI is helping companies rack up impressive ROI figures. Business intelligence is being used to identify cost-cutting ideas, uncover new business opportunities, roll ERP data into accessible reports, react quickly to retail demand and optimize prices. TruServ’s Hastie, for example, spent $250,000 on BI software from Business Objects and says the investment paid off in about two months. Besides using it to track anomalies like the gophers through an executive dashboard, TruServ is also pressing it into service as a CRM tool and is using it to integrate data from disparate accounting systems, which will help the company close its books two days earlier every month.

Otherwise tight-fisted CIOs are spending money on BI software because its relatively low investment yields fast payback, says Larry Downes, strategy consultant and author of Unleashing the Killer App and The Strategy Machine. "[Unused data] is still a great source of untapped productivity and competitive advantage for most companies," he says. Just how much data is going unused? Downes guesses companies are extracting value from only about 20 percent of their data.