As observed in the stories of fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, there's more than one kind of intelligence. In an 1893 story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter," readers learn that Holmes admires his older brother Mycroft for having superior powers of observation and deduction—while at the same time saying that Mycroft is "incapable" of applying those powers to the craft of detective work.

"If the art of the detective began and ended in reasoning from an armchair, my brother would be the greatest criminal agent that ever lived. But he has no ambition and no energy," Sherlock tells his colleague Dr. Watson. "He will not even go out of his way to verify his own solutions, and would rather be considered wrong than take the trouble to prove himself right." I found myself thinking of the paradox of an intelligence that lacks the practical faculties of application after speaking last week with Charles Nicholls, founder and CEO of SeeWhy Software.

SeeWhy announces this week the general release of its Enterprise Edition business intelligence product, following an extended period of testing with early adopter sites. As Nicholls told me during our conversation, "We want to change the way that people analyze data. There's no reason today why people should analyze data that's out of date, but it's incredibly difficult to make the data warehouse anything else." SeeWhy's approach, he said, begins with a real-time event-driven engine for recognizing and analyzing significant data blips, then couples it into a message-oriented environment that lets developers apply the results close to the point where they can have the greatest leverage.

Read the full story on eWEEK.com: Put Intelligence Where It Helps