"If I can come up with a solution that helps [an employee] understand where his pain is and what he can do about it, that is powerful," he said. "We try to use that as a marketing tool internally."

Even with those efforts, Wolters said he still has to prove the benefits of BI to his CIO and even to other IT employees. "We have spent a lot of time evangelizing BI to the IT folks," he said. "They still are in the mind-set that BI is just reporting."

Ted Bross, associate director of administrative information services at Princeton University, said that though he knows that the university's Cognos BI tools have made life easier and better for users, he can't easily quantify those benefits for university officials.

"We would like to think that in time, we will be able to demonstrate the value of BI to our university executives, but we're not there yet," Bross said. "Positive feedback from faculty and staff make us feel like we are on the right track."

Proving BI's tangible value has not been a problem for all companies, however.