Too much information

If you don't pay close attention to how you put your business intelligence system together, you could find the whole thing more trouble than it's worth.

Online analytical processing tools "are very powerful in the way they can drill down into data, so you have to be very careful in the way you select and structure the data that will be used in [business intelligence] applications," said Kelly Croft, assistant director for workforce information at the Office of Personnel Management. "Privacy requirements don't allow certain information about government employees to be released, for example."

And don't rely on information technology to cover you on this, he warned, because "as yet there just is no good technology solution that will allow you to automatically block these kinds of things."