LISBON, PORTUGAL. - SAS, the leader in business and analytical intelligence, today announced its plans to help organisations worldwide to implement a Business Intelligence Competency Centre (BICC).

Business Intelligence is reaching more and more constituents inside and outside of organisations. Information demands, data volumes and audience populations are growing and continue to grow exponentially. As the demand increases, so does the imperative for a sound Enterprise Intelligence strategy to meet today's short term needs and to provide the foundation to meet a longer term vision.

In order to overcome common issues, more and more organisations are turning to SAS to help them to develop a BICC. This holistic approach to business intelligence encompasses more than just the technology; it is a part of the overall information strategy. A Business Intelligence Competency Centre is a permanent formal organisational structure that includes representatives from the business and IT, to advance and promote the effective use of business intelligence to support the organisation's business strategy.

An organisation with a BICC will see the following benefits:

• Increased business user satisfaction
• Increased usage of business intelligence
• Better understanding of the value of business intelligence
• Increased decision-making speed
• Decreased staff costs
• Decreased software costs

"For almost three decades, SAS has been helping organisations drive business strategies that evolve information from operational knowledge to create intelligence for innovative decision making," said Gloria Miller, vice president, professional services, SAS. "Within our customer engagements we have amassed a great deal of information on the issues organisations face with information delivery and how they solve those issues across their organisations."

There are different functional areas that can form part of a Competency Centre and SAS can help identify which areas make the best sense and help organisations to put them into action. SAS customers presenting at SAS Forum International that have already set up Competency Centres include Nedbank Retail (South Africa), KBC Bank & Insurance Group (Belgium), KLM (Netherlands), CSI Piemonte (Italy), Research Institute of Russian Railways (Russia).