Project No 2: Business Analytics

Project No 2: Business Analytics: "Demand for analytical tools increasingly comes from all departments, from marketing and sales up to the executive suite. In the post-Enron era, top managers in particular need to be able to document and explain the metrics that underlie their decisions, according to Robert Blumstein, a research director at IDC.

'Distributing analytics to the whole organization has empowered employees to make decisions that in the past they didn't have the data to make�or might have made in off-handed ways,' he says.

IDC expects the analytics software market, which includes both basic and more sophisticated predictive tools, to continue to grow from $8 billion in 2003 to $11 billion in 2008, about 8% per year."