With all the questions surrounding the value of business intelligence, a new discipline is starting to emerge that holds the promise of rescuing ourselves from ourselves.

Over the last few months a lot of progress has been made in the filed of predictive analytics. The core idea is that a lot of the processes that we really need to understand in order to be intelligent about business are just too complex for the average person to comprehend on a daily or even hourly basis.

To give people a fighting chance when it comes to being intelligent about any given business process, vendors such as SPSS are now seeking to bring predictive analysis tools to mainstream users. As a discipline, predictive analysis tools have been around on mainframe-class systems for years. But as the processing power available on the desktop and servers has dramatically increased in the last few years, it's now possible to make predictive analytic capabilities more broadly available.

To make its software intelligent enough to be useful, SPSS has embedded Web services software that links the predictive analysis software to any data source in the enterprise. Users then set up a model of the business process they want to track and the software then identifies what part of that business process are static and what elements are variable. It then focuses on the tracking the variables to issue alerts that tell users when some activity or another is outside of an established norm.

Of course, the software is only as good as the model of the business process. To make up for human error, SPSS has created a Ghost Model function that also monitors a given business process. That system will then challenge the person who created the model with alternative models that may better reflect what is happening in any given business process being monitored. In effect, the SPSS software is monitoring the click stream of a given business process on a continuous basis.

We still need more people that actually understand what the business process is in the first place. But as software becomes more intelligent, it may be the whole discipline of predictive analytics will finally provide the missing link to the business intelligence question that has for so long vexed us all.