Chief Jon Greiner recently expanded his staff of crime analysts from one to 11 without hiring a single new officer at the Ogden Police Department in Utah.

Instead, Greiner equipped his existing force of eight lieutenants and two assistant chiefs with new, easy-to-use, Web-based business intelligence tools that enable the police veterans to combine and manipulate data from arrest records, court documents, probation logs, jurisdictional maps and other sources to identify patterns and pinpoint hot spots so they can stop crimes before they happen.

"My police officers -- who are 30 years younger -- are gamers, and I thought that if I could put something user-friendly in their hands, they could do great things as crime analysts," explains Greiner. Today, the officers are using the new BI tools to perform geographic profiling of crimes and analysis of police data "in seconds," he says. Before, it could take days for the department's single crime analyst to fulfill a report request. An added bonus is that experienced police officers with extensive street experience are now able to apply their firsthand knowledge to crime analysis.

"You have practitioners asking the what-if questions, which has changed the way we police," Greiner says.

Welcome to Business Intelligence 2.0, a world in which one of BI's original big promises is finally being met, and a broader class of everyday business users -- as opposed to statisticians or data analysts -- are tapping into innovative technologies and Web-based BI capabilities. Police officers, physicians, accountants and salespeople are mashing up and analyzing structured and unstructured data from far-flung sources in the ways that make the most contextual sense to them.

"All of these new technologies are about making it easier to build and consume analytical applications," says Gartner Inc. analyst Kurt Schlegel. Today, he notes, companies frequently cite a lack of both end-user and developer skills as a major barrier when deploying traditional BI applications. Indeed, anecdotal evidence suggests that no more than 20% of users in most organizations use reporting, ad hoc query and online analytical processing tools on a regular basis.

Instead, most companies rely on already overburdened IT departments or in-house teams of BI experts to fulfill users' requests for reports, analyses and forecasts, a process that can take weeks or longer. Then, when decision-makers finally receive a report, they often discount or distrust it because the data is no longer relevant or timely.

However, that's beginning to radically change, thanks to highly intuitive, easier-to-use Web-based user interfaces and better data management and access schemes, such as service-oriented data architectures, which enable users to mash up data in increasingly standardized formats from a variety of sources.

"We're seeing mashups with GIS mapping technology as well as on-demand BI solutions that let users combine and display their own data with data from external sources," says IDC analyst Dan Vesset. "The goal is to get IT out of development [of user interfaces and reports] and get them more involved in data quality and data integrations. That's their highest value-add."

"Another very big change is an awareness of BI's potential at the business management layer in companies," Vesset notes. "Business is seeing real value in analytics. Many organizations are starting information management groups and BI competency centers that sit on the business side."

A New Way of Thinking

One example is the Massachusetts Housing Finance Agency. The BI team there has incorporated geographical mapping capabilities, including location intelligence features from Pitney Bowes Inc.'s MapInfo software, into its Cognos BI dashboard as a way to make information accessible in geographical form to users across the entire agency. Before, only 12 superusers had access to geographical tools. Now, all 300 of the agency's workers can access and manipulate BI data in geographical form, says Carl Richardson, BI project manager.

"We anticipate that more people will do analysis," says Richardson. "It will allow the average user to think geographically when it comes to data. They could create both thematic and