For example, Lowe's Companies Inc. CIO Steve Stone noted that the retailer has been using BI tools for years to identify fraudulent returns, manage its supply chain and monitor corporate performance. Yet Stone said he is still asked by top executives for a specific return on his BI investment.

At the same time, BI has become so critical to Lowe's that the home improvement retailer is building a new data center in San Antonio, in large part to back up its Teradata data warehouse and BI applications from McLean, Va.-based MicroStrategy Inc., he said.

"In the end, you're likely to be faced with some form of 'proof' question," Stone said during a keynote presentation at the MicroStrategy World 2007 user conference held in Las Vegas last week. And, he noted, "definitive proof is hard to come by."

For example, several years ago, Lowe's used its data warehouse and BI tools to help solve a problem with collecting fees for delivering products to customers. Payments for deliveries increased by US$30 million in the year after the company first started using the tools to find out which stores weren't collecting the fees, Stone said. "This is an example of what BI is adding to the bottom line," he said.

Still, the CEO at the time asked Stone whether he could definitively link the bump in collections to the use of BI. "There is no silver bullet, [but] if you continue to deliver value, the funding always seems to inch its way back to your budget," Stone said.