Better decision making from data you have collected, more targeting of customers, and integrated data for decision making sound a lot like business intelligence. Indeed, some organizations have had success with using business intelligence to improve operational decisions.
Many organizations, however, have found a gap between gaining insights from business intelligence and taking action to exploit that insight in operational decisions. This gap, shown in Figure 1, arises because although BI gives you insight into business performance, it's largely insight for knowledge workers and decision makers. For instance, business intelligence might show you that customer retention rates are dropping. Although this data is informative for management, it's less helpful in influencing the behavior of CSRs. Only by manually coding a change to CSR systems has a typical organization been able to make use of this insight.
It's easy to use reporting and related analysis tools for a view in the rearview mirror -- to show you what has happened in the past. In contrast, EDM is about using technology to understand the view ahead through the windshield. Which way is the road bending? How fast can I safely take that corner? What road rules apply right now?
Figure 1. An insight-to-action gap caused by manual decision making and updating operational systems