The advent of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the recent years has presented an opportunity for the IT managers and the senior officials in the government to change the way organizations leverage and value their information assets. In contrast to the private organizations, government organizations are measured not by profits and losses, but by their ability to deliver upon their mission. Regardless of this mission, the ability to understand the citizen and the ability to use the resources are the key factors in matching services to citizen needs. As a major step, the National Informatics Center has established a nation-wide communication network and to a maximum extent the e-governance solutions initiated by NIC at the central and state level could fulfill the desired goals. The thrust has varied across initiatives, with some focusing on enabling the citizen-state interface for various government services, and others focusing on bettering livelihoods. New applications in all areas of planning and strategic operation are being developed and used at all levels. There are still some grey areas, which need special attention which require special tools and technology. Value of Business Intelligence Technology Information is one of the governments most valuable assets. When used properly, it can help planners and decision makers in making informed decisions leading to positive impact on targeted group of citizens. However, to use information to its fullest potential, the planners and decision makers need instant access to relevant data in a properly summarized form. In spite of taking lots of initiative on the IT front, the government decision makers have difficulty in obtaining meaningful information in a timely manner because they have to request and depend on IT staff for making special reports which often takes long time to generate. Information warehouses can deliver strategic intelligence to the decision makers and provide an insight into the overall situation. By organizing data into a meaningful data warehouse, the decision makers can be empowered with a flexible tool that enables them to make informed policy decisions for citizen facilitation and accessing their impact over the intended section of the population. What Business Intelligence means It is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing and providing speedy access to data to help the decision makers in making decisions. Typically, BI applications include decision support systems, query and reporting, On Line Analytical Process (OLAP), data mining (a technology to extract unknown and hidden patterns and knowledge from within the data), statistical analysis and forecasting. Business Intelligence therefore is well suited for e- governance applications in the G2G, G2C and C2G environment. For effective implementation of a BI solution, the de facto condition is a reliable data warehouse with a mechanism to update on a regular interval. Business Intelligence technologies Data warehouse and Data mining helps planners and policy makers to draw key conclusions from data, a critical component of e-Governance system sustainability. The Beneficiaries of the BI based system Typically, in the government environment BI technology is more towards G2G, G2C and C2G than other forms. All the government plans and decisions can be arrived with the help of detailed multi-dimensional analyses of relevant data. In fact it helps the citizens more than the government. The citizens can have a compact and compiled profile of each individual from the government and everything the citizen can have it as a web based report and the same can be used wherever the citizen desires. is available as a web based report. In the e-governance environment, the cost of providing infrastructure would be a big challenge. The costs of new technologies get distributed and in comparison to the value generated, it is worthwhile to invest in such infrastructure only when all the three participants –Government, Citizen and Business Community effectively put it to use. The data warehouses combine multiple sources of information with a primary goal of integrating the information. The complexity of security increases when different sources of information are combined. For example, financial information will have more stringent security plan than that of health and education. Further, security needs to be implemented both at the warehouse and application level. A large number of e-governance applications are already in operation in most of the state centers. What is needed at this stage is to evaluate the existing BI infrastructure vis-à- vis BI-E-governance applications on a long-term sustainability. This is the right time for introducing BI in e-governance and to strengthen the e-governance system. Typically Right to Information (RTI) cases throughout the country will grow exponentially over time. RTI will cover G2C and C2G. To make G2C and C2G more efficient and effective one needs to have business intelligence, typically Data warehouses and OLAP. RTI is one such application. There are large number of applications in the category of G2C and C2G, which need attention of BI technology. For further information, kindly contact p.lenin@nic.in Note : The full version of this article is available at the informatics website (http://informatics.nic.in)