Today, the term Business Intelligence (BI) is used synonymously with Decision Support System (DSS), which is an organized collection of people, computerized tools (software, databases, and devices), processes, and procedures used to support problem specific managerial decision-making. BI/DSS is used at all levels within an organization and sometimes tailored to focus on specific business areas, such as banking, sales, finance, healthcare, and so forth. BI/DSS is interactive and provides ad hoc queries and reporting tools to retrieve data and display it in desired formats. Even with the very powerful BI/DSS presence, the human component is still at the center of BI/DSS technology.

For example, the U.S. department of defense is using its Business intelligence Trac2es system to track and monitor sick or injured U.S. military personnel worldwide, and plan for their medical care. This BI system uses information builders Inc.’s WebFocus tools to analyze data in an Oracle database, which is securely accessed using a Web browser. Likewise, the U.S. government under the recovery act and transparency is using MicroStrategy’s dynamic dashboards to aggregate and display all data submitted by its agencies in their "Financial and Activity Reports" contained on Recovery.gov.