Would you like a bottle of Dom Perignon 2000 vintage champagne? If so, read on.

There are many things that make working in a business intelligence consultancy enormously satisfying:
+ you’re presented with a constant stream of fresh, interesting and stimulating challenges
+ you get to meet some truly great organisations, big and small, in all manner of sectors
+ you get to meet some inspirational leaders (some of whom are running the company and some of whom are working within the company)

But there’s one thing I really struggle with and recently, when I ran a workshop on business intelligence for some of the superstars of the local business scene, I confessed this to the group there.

My problem is the short, crisp description of the business and what we do – a part of the elevator pitch. Give me ten minutes, some visuals (and a room with all the exits blocked) and I like to think I do a good job of explaining the power of business intelligence / data visualisation / guided analytics. But frankly who wants to sit next to someone who takes that long to say what they do? Certainly not me.

I spend my days making dashboards that are powerful, to-the-point communication tools. So where’s my powerful, to-the-point description of what I do? What’s a great way to describe dashboards or BI to someone who’s never heard of either?

One of the people in the workshop, almost without hesitation, came up with the following:

“We gather, store and retrieve timely, accurate and relevant information so that sensible business decisions can be made”
(Giles Henschel, MD and clearly smashing chap, Olives et Al, probably © by now!)

What I’d like to do is throw this challenge out to a wider audience and so I’d like to offer  a cheeky bottle of champagne for the person who best answers the following:

What’s a great, engaging, accessible description of our world of business intelligence and data visualisation?

Please add them as comments below so others can see your contributions.

Now you’ve made it down this far, we’ll unblock the exits…

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The boring bit: Closing date for suggestions is Oct 31st, 2010. The judge’s decision is final. The prize has no cash value. It’s just a bit of fun. Other terms and conditions may apply and I’ll make those up if someone asks me a question about the competition.