Wayne Sipperly, manager of energy markets analysis at theNew York Power Authority, suggested that companies focus such BI projects in areas that can help meet corporate objectives and gain executive support.

The electricity supplier in White Plains, N.Y., has melded analytics and a rules engine with multiple transactional data sources to provide dashboards for its electricity traders, asset managers and executives, Sipperly said.

Since going into production in February 2005, the project has saved traders an hour per day each, yielding US$500,000 to $1 million in annual savings for the utility, he said. "You can't try to sell it for human resources [projects]," Sipperly advised. "You have to sell it where the dollars are."

The power authority's portal gives traders a dashboard with real-time information they can use to prepare 1,100 daily bids to buy electricity, he said. The traders base those bids on 26 sets of data from 11 sources.

Previously, "traders would end up with two screens and 20 windows open," Sipperly said. "There were no alerts, no trending capabilities. There was a heavy reliance on manual spreadsheets."