Economic adversity represents opportunity. Slowdowns can lead to new opportunities for companies to emerge smarter, leaner, and more competitive.

A downturn tends to spark subsequent waves of new innovation because it forces governments and businesses to solve various problems.

IT is typically a source of innovation, automation and optimisation of business processes. It is through IT that businesses become more agile and more competitive.

Business intelligence (BI) technologies enable executives, managers, and knowledge workers to aggregate, filter, analyse, and navigate information.

This may include business planning, reporting and analysis.

If BI and performance management are all about enabling a company to operate more efficiently and ease hard decisions, there may never be a more advantageous time to make that investment – when business conditions are so challenging.

In banking, success is increasingly predicated on customer insight. The more an institution knows about its customers, the better. This helps banks to price their products and services for customers with a clear and measurable understanding of risk.

Competitive pricing stimulates organic growth or cross-selling opportunities, helps companies acquire new customers and strengthens risk management.

With BI, banks can define consistent risk-based pricing models that enable relationship managers to quickly measure and assess new profitability scenarios – and their associated potential risk – then compare them to corporate/hurdle rate targets.

This minimises the institution’s risk by ensuring that pricing offers align with corporate goals and can be easily adjusted as strategies and corporate policies change.

Datamonitor recently predicted that global spending on BI by retail banks will reach $9bn (£5.5bn) by 2012, up from $5.6bn in 2006.

The key is to avoid standing still or succumbing to the temptation to scale back on the very investments that can best position an organisation to withstand rough economic times.

Rob Ashe is general manager for business intelligence and performance management products at IBM Cognos