Business Intelligence in the cloud is already accumulating!
This is a great example - Compare web site traffic at Alexa . Here the web site performance of Wikipedia is being compared to that of New York Time. Alexa provides the ability to compare up to five sites and one of them can be your own website.
One of the very useful new frontiers in Business Intelligence that could emerge is the storage and benchmarking comparison of Company performance. A lot of data and information is already available in the Net from public companies around the globe at least once a quarter.
The same kind of comparison and benchmarking in the cloud can be done for company performance. Product and service sales performance combined with Geocoding and Demographics information is making possible detailed mashups already. Extend this to financial and process performance and you have a veritable goldmine of Business Intelligence that is even more useful than just looking at trends in your own performance.
How do you compare with that of companies your own size? Larger? Smaller? The Best in your Class? The Best in your Industry?
This does not have to stop with for-profit companies. Non-profit organizations can benefit even more in fine tuning their own performance and manage in a fine way, the perception of donors and how their donations are spent.
No man is happy but by comparison. - Thomas Shadwell












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