Since I am throwing out buzzwords tonight I should include this one too:
business intelligence is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, providing access to, and analyzing data for the purpose of helping enterprise users make better business decisions. The term implies having a comprehensive knowledge of all of the factors that affect your business. It is imperative that you have an in depth knowledge about factors such as your customers, competitors, business partners, economic environment, and internal operations to make effective and good quality business decisions. Business intelligence enables you to make these kinds of decisions.
[via Wikipedia: Business Intelligence]
Much of my time has been spent working with executives to define business rules. When developing software the powers a business it is imperative that the business rules be well defined. It is important to ask the right questions when getting the rules defined. Too often I feel the technologist defines the business rules when writing the software and then explains them to the executive. It is much more effective when the technologist has the capacity to understand the business enough to help the executives define the rules in a way that can translate to the software.
I feel the next step for me may be to move into Business Intelligence and use technology to help gauge the effectiveness or processes and rules to allow for more agility to the accelerating pace of change in the market.
