BI (BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE) is working its way into more aspects of corporate operations and is being used by more employees than ever. Some say that the more people use BI information, the more valuable that data becomes. InfoWorld Senior Writer Tom Sullivan spoke with one such BI evangelist, Business Objects' CEO Bernard Liautaud, about how BI is being transformed into a strategic system, Liautaud's Law of Business Intelligence, and why the e makes a difference in the moniker e-business intelligence.

InfoWorld: How do you think business intelligence has changed in the last year?

Liautaud: BI is now everywhere. BI has moved from being a technical system to a strategic system for corporations. It's a component of everything -- e-commerce, CRM [customer relationship management], ERP [enterprise resource planning] -- and companies, therefore, are looking at BI as a strategic initiative that they want to have enterprisewide, across all these different projects. Probably the biggest thing that has changed is the level of importance of BI. And that is driven by the fact that people have put in different project applications -- the ERP, the CRM. What these initiatives are doing is automate a number of business processes. They automate the sales force; they automate the financial system; they automate the HR processes; they automate their Web site. In the end, all these automations are useless until you can collect, gather, and analyze all the information that is collected through these processes. The second big change is that BI is now a key component of e-business and a key component of how companies interact with each other. It's not just how a company, internally, can be more efficient, but it's how they can create a flow of information between themselves and their customers and suppliers. So far, the overall trend in e-business has focused on purchasing, selling, and doing procurement over the Net, so it is very much transaction-based. And now we are moving from transaction to information, and companies are focusing a lot of energy on how they can intelligently provide information to their business partners. That is a key component in order to create that famous business ecosystem.

InfoWorld: What will it take to get to the point where every employee in an organization uses BI tools on a regular basis?

Liautaud: I think everything is in place to do it. If customers realize that the value of BI is in the ability for everyone to have it, that is how you create that collective intelligence. If someone is still working on putting together a sales-force automation package or an ERP package, they may look at this as the second step, for afterward. Once they put in place the transaction piece, then they are going to put in the analysis piece. So it is a question of time, but we are definitely getting there.

InfoWorld: You've said that