Business Intelligence (BI) is the catalyst for making good management decisions. BI is key to maintaining our excellent management reputation. BI enables "knowledge workers" to convert raw data first to information and then to actionable knowledge that management can use to make the right decisions. BI includes not just reporting and ad-hoc queries, but also data analysis (including dashboards, scorecards, forecasting, etc.) and data management. The Commonwealth BI Initiative focuses on reporting and data analysis.

The benefits of BI to Commonwealth agencies include:

• improved access to information
• improved communication
• more reliable data
• higher performing reporters / analysts
• better analysis
• simplified data sharing