The amount of data accessible to businesses is growing quickly with the increasing use of automation, databases and electronic communication. Using this data effectively allows management to monitor and analyse the business objectively, and to quantify performance rather than rely on intuition and isolated observations. We have experience at gathering data from a variety of systems into one repository, processing that data to make it more useful and uniform and then using it to produce automated reports. There is a bewildering array of products on offer for this, and an even larger set of buzzwords that refer to the latest technologies.