Not a day goes by without a politician or banker talking about the global recessions. Many would have us believe that the whole world is collapsing around us and nobody is able to make a profit. It is accepted that the recession has hit many businesses both small and large where it hurts, the bottom line.

Customers are no longer willing to go into profligate spending based on unsustainable credit. There have been many bankruptcies both personal and institutional. The darkened mood of the consumers makes them prefer saving to spending.

Unemployment has virtually depleted the reserves of disposable income that so defined the age of the boom and burst. This article aims to ask the question as to whether business intelligence should act as a reactive or even defensive mechanism to cope with fluctuating economic situations.

The sources of business intelligence can be both local and industry wide. Even internationally there are mechanisms to disseminate useful data about what has happened and what is likely to happen. Recessions and periods of austerity are not new to us. In the same way that a business can predict that sales are likely to pick up during the Christmas festivities, an economy can predict that where it is supported by vast amounts of dubious credit, the economy will fall at some stage.

Why is it then the people seemed to have been caught by surprise? The banking crisis’s that plagued the globe were talked about in the most awestruck tones as if people had never had of banks failing. Governments reacted with horror at the rising unemployment figures as if they had never had unemployment before.

The biggest victims were individuals and small businesses which generally do not have very sophisticated business intelligence systems but were never too big to fail. They did not have the ability to pressure governments into giving them crisis loans or bail-out money. All they did was to put up and if they went down, the entrepreneurs would wait and give it another go when the climate improved.

Does it have to be this way all the time? One would hope that many business people have learned the lessons of the global downturn and if it next happens (as it surely will), they are better prepared. Sadly history tells us that the same mistakes will be repeated over and over again.

Nevertheless even at this time of a recession firms can look at business intelligence as a means of mitigating some of the more devastating consequences of a difficult economy. For example some of the supermarkets have started offering quite a lot of budget in-house items which tend to cost much less than the branded items.

This was based on market intelligence gleaned from the buying patterns of their customers during the global recession. Credit card companies also scaled back on their lending criteria on the basis that their customer pool had an altered income and spending profile. That is the essence of using market intelligence to cope with market pressures.