The shifting public conversation in business intelligence makes it a struggle for marketers to clearly articulate it, for customers to relate to it, and writers to report on it. “What is it? There is an identity crisis around it” says Jim Davis, chief marketing officer of SAS.  Indeed if there is one thing industry leaders agree on is everyone defines it differently.  As a brand strategist I make this suggestion to vendors in the BI space: think of BI as a brand.  Other organizations already see value in just associating with business intelligence.  

I recommend anchoring the conversation in self-evident truths that make it universally accessible.  Go beyond self-referential vocabularies of the market and technologists.  Articulate a BI cosmology that will engage a meaningful dialogue across corporate, government, and academic leadership.  The story begins with the changing global economy that demands we run faster in order to stay in place. 

Thomas Friedman’s flattening world requires we make sense of our actions or risk extinction in the closed loop of reactive tactical thinking.  At this level the virtues of BI become clear to companies, countries, communities and individuals.  This story will get people thinking, talking, and blogging.

By expanding the conversation to values rather than technology we elevate the customer to stakeholder.  The stakeholder will think strategically and be quicker to adopt solutions that further support long-term goals. The bottomline is that there are many competing truths to know.  But the truths people really care about are the ones they act on.  This applies to adopting the BI methodology as it does analytic software.