I recently posted an article on Dashboard Insight to answer the question:
what is BI? In the article I didn't dive into the details of the processes, the data, the technology, and all the other intricacies of BI. I purposely did that because I felt all the other BI resources explained BI in the traditional sense very well. What I wanted to drive home with my article was the importance of aligning strategic goals with operational activities. It sounds obvious but from my experience I find BI initiatives do not take this into account. BI usually means streamlining the process of getting data to the decision makers.
In a recent report, Gartner stated that 70% - 80% of BI projects fail. Many reasons are provided including: aligning IT with corporate, the analogy to software development project failures, and lack of training.
I opine it's the poor communication of corporate goals to the workforce. Add that to the definition of BI and I think people will start looking at BI as more than just quickly getting large sets of data to decision makers.