At the operational level, decision makers need more aggregated information, sorted and tallied in different ways, to monitor success and plan next steps compared to those at the strategic level.
Mid-level decisions undertaken by managers by drawing upon business intelligence to implement marketing plans and product development are made at the tactical level.
Strategic-level decisions involve direct interactions with customers and have predetermined policies and procedures that spell out how to handle different situations.
Data warehouses offer an opportunity to combine the data housed in separate systems into one and then load it to a database optimized for complex queries.
The online analytical processing system allows users to slice and dice massive amounts of data stored in data warehouses to reveal significant patterns and trends.
Optimization is an extension of goal seeking in which a user can change many variables to reach some maximum or minimum target, as long as the changes stay within the constraints the user identifies.