by Ericka Chickowski

Aberdeen Group has a really enlightening piece of research up for free right now (through May 1), concerning Business Intelligence. The post goes into great detail about the ways collaborative tools in BI can really help an organization flourish.

I've written in the past that BI spending remains strong, despite broad cuts in IT budgets, and this report really gets into why that's so.

As Aberdeen's analysts explain, best-in-class organizations are able use BI to improve information accuracy, relevance, and timeliness. From a business perspective, this means a jump in customer service responsiveness, employee productivity and business process efficiency.

The bottom line numbers bear that out. Aberdeen found that best-in-class companies successfully maintained 23 percent organic revenue growth compared to 9 percent at other companies.