The trend toward evidence-based decision-making is taking root in commercial, non-profit and public sector organizations. Driven by increased competition due to changing business models, deregulation or, in some cases, increased regulation in the form of new compliance requirements, organizations in all industries and of all sizes are turning to business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing (DW) technologies and services to either automate or support decision-making processes.

An increasing number of organizations are making BI functionality more pervasively available to all decision makers, be they executives or customer-facing employees, line-of-business managers or suppliers.

Pervasive BI results when organizational culture, business processes and technologies are designed and implemented with the goal of improving the strategic and operational decision-making capabilities of a wide range of internal and external stakeholders.