This exploratory study focuses on Finnish enterprises and examines how and why they are applying
business intelligence today. Especially the process from data into knowledge and how business intelligence
is utilized in decision making have been studied. We observed that BI tools improve the speed
and quality of decision making and BI tools were coupled with actual decision making. BI tools are used
frequently but those are only means to an end and in order to examine how they are used to attain specific
outcomes. Most of the end users utilised the loosely-coupled approach, but half of the respondents also
utilised BI with tighter coupling, structured human decisions, by using customised analyses and reports
for certain problems and even creating ones themselves but the tightest form of coupling, automated
decision making, remained rare.