ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the strategic management aspects of Business Intelligence (BI) in general. Information, economics is part of microeconomic theory and at the end of the 1960s, when computers became a commonplace technology for information management in large organizations, it also addressed issues concerned with the economics of information technology. Originally, information economics (IE) was used to justify the investment in management accounting systems but by extension IE is used for any investment, enhancing the information asymmetry to the advantage of the investor. A major financial institution experimented with BI on a technical level: tool selection and a proof of concept. The exercise of building a BI system will further the cooperation between information and communication technology and the user community, inasmuch as both parties will have to think about their data strategies. Once the BI system is in use, statistics will indicate data usage intensity and will give directions as to which data are worth storing.
