There are two main business intelligence modes: the “strategic relations” mode and the “interactive mode”, with an analysis which interactively responds to user demands.

They each correspond to different needs and are sometimes complementary:

• Obtain recurrent information, which corresponds to predefined analysis, for example the breakdown of sales by region ;

• Searching for information by carrying out different successive analyses, the results of each lead to new questions, which in turn require the selection of different elements for analysis.

These tools are the same in some ways, but are quite different in others:

• The recurrent analyses are prepared upstream. Configuration can necessitate expert intervention. Once prepared, they will be produced regularly, almost automatically.

• On the other hand, interactive analyses must be under the end user‟s control, who is no longer just an analysis consumer, but the key player, yet someone who is not a technical expert on business intelligence tools. This means that the tools used in these analyses must be very user friendly, both in regards to functions and to technical configuration. They must allow complete abstraction from technical know-how, and SQL database language in particular, as it must be assumed that users will not have prior technical knowledge.

• Finally, the interactive or ad hoc analysis also requires excellent response times, to allow the user to experiment directly and narrow down their analysis.