The term "Business Intelligence" encompasses the areas of Decision Support Systems, Data Warehousing, and analytical software applications. Business Intelligence tells management how best to deploy the resources it can control to achieve the business results that it wants. Business Intelligence systems consist of databases of relevant business information and software to retrieve and present it to decision makers in a compelling format on demand.

The Worcester Group, Inc. has been designing and developing Business Intelligence systems since 1995 for customers in industries that include pharmaceuticals, consumer packaged goods, luxury fashion, medical information systems and entertainment.

Most businesses accumulate vast stores of data in "information silos" situated in individual business units or departments. Bringing data from these silos together in a data warehouse adds utility and value by assembling the “big picture” like a jigsaw puzzle. WGI will develop the architecture of an enterprise data warehouse, extract the data from all your silos, cleans and integrate it for on-demand business analysis.

There are a lot of very good analytical software products available today. The Worcester Group can help you select the ones that most cost-effectively meet the needs of your business units, train your users and administrators, and help you get the most out of your BI investment.

A BI system retrieves data from a data warehouse and presents it to the people who need it on demand in a high-impact visual format. It may be a standard tabular report or a graph. But often, a single report or graph doesn’t tell the whole story. Dashboards are displays that combine multiple related reports and charts so that anyone who views them sees a multi-faceted snapshot of the business conditions. Dashboards can be made interactive. The user may be able to alter a parameter by activating and changing a visual control, and the dashboard contents can be instantly recalculated and the new results displayed.

Dashboards can be great motivators. By constructing a dashboard to show the relation between company goals and individual or group performance (as shown by key performance indicators) all stakeholders can see instantly the effect of their own contribution to the business’s success.