Is there a place for pervasiveness?

I guess I am going to come across as a BI heretic here, but is there a place for BI at the heart of all business life? In part this piece springs from a few points made by Jerry Brown of Bloor Research in a recent article. The whole Jerry's piece really encapsulates the need to combine structured with unstructured data, an amalgamation of content management with the traditional operational reporting and OLAP disciplines; after all isn't all modern data just this: 'all things known'

But one of the early points made struck home. Who exactly would use pervasive analytics? Most businesses would only employ a very small number of analysts, and many, many more people who actually get jobs done. Of course, I am not belittling the role of an analyst, it's just that it's their job to be thorough and the type of person who does this well may not be suited for quick-n-dirty work. Suppose you were a line of business manager and across your desktop comes a 'red traffic light' report of widget sales in the Central Region, do you click on it, drill down and across to find out that your competitor is running a widget promotion in the region or do you pass it on to an analyst to, er, analyse?

That's not say that information should not be disseminated, it just means that right degree of detail is available to everyone to allow them to do their jobs better. This could be SOA-style hooks into line-of-business applications, pre-canned reports, and (for a minority) the tools that allow detailed analysis.