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	Gerald D. Cohen Information Builders President and CEO

This edition of Information Builders Magazine emphasizes our adoption of the term Business Intelligence. It's a market we've always been in, but we've used different words to describe it.

We consider the two key aspects of Business Intelligence to be the ability to monitor and control operations through the routine and timely delivery of information within an organization and to solve problems as they arise.

As you will see throughout the Magazine, Information Builders customers effortlessly use our software for both of these purposes.

For the City of Richmond and MedStar Health, business intelligence is a matter of life and death. The City could be underwater without careful planning - really, see the article. Not only do city officials and engineers use business intelligence to routinely monitor operations, they can also solve crises as they arise, even if they're in a truck in the middle of the night.

MedStar is using business intelligence technology to help provide state-of-the-art patient care, a goal all hospitals aspire to but only great information systems can help achieve. Doctors, nurses, and clinicians in the emergency room, for instance, can access lab results immediately - as they're treating the patient - and get a complete, integrated view of that patient's medical records at the same time.

Not all of our customers are using business intelligence to save lives, but they are all using it for operations critical to their businesses.

PNC Bank is improving their customer service and cutting costs with an online reporting system for monitoring and analyzing the performance of their call centers. SEB Private Bank is giving account managers and customers the ability to manage their portfolios in real time, via e-mail alerts about stock conditions. And you might be eating more Utz Potato Chips these days because Utz is growing at a tremendous rate. The company has more information about its inventory than its competitors have about theirs. If a manager sees that a store is not properly stocked for a big promotion, for example, he can find the source of the problem and correct it instantly.

As Keith Gile and Don Peppers point out in their interviews, more people today than ever expect information - when and how they want it. The job of business intelligence is to present that information so they can see the significance quickly and take action. The challenge is to provide business intelligence in a way that meets all the users' needs – across the enterprise – and IT's needs, while meeting the organization's goals.

Information Builders' WebFOCUS is the most usable, scalable, and deployable business intelligence solution on the market today. Millions of people use it each day in critical, real-life situations. In fact, many of our customers tell us they deploy thousands of applications to 5000, 10,000, and even 200,000 users.

Our goal is to provide a single product for enterprise reporting - first, to help you monitor where you're going and second, to help solve problems as they arise.

I think you will enjoy this issue, and find our customers' accomplishments a stimulating impetus to your own plans.