This paper examines many types of reporting requirements faced by today’s organizations, with attention to formal government legislation, industry-specific regulations, and internal governance. The overriding purpose is to explain the challenges, highlight potential solutions, and demonstrate how an enterprise business intelligence (BI) environment can help companies overcome hurdles related to gathering, analyzing, presenting, and storing information.

This paper does not attempt to cover every industry regulation or offer details about all types of compliance, but rather to use a few examples to reveal how business intelligence technology can be applied universally in many different situations, where reporting and compliance are pertinent.