Peter Coffee's Port Scans in eWeek discusses Active Warehousing and a recent talk by Stephen Brobst of Teradata. Brobst has given a number of talks recently on the future of data mining, business intelligence, etc (based on a Google search).
Essentially, Coffee describes what I have always believed that information tools should be able to do: help us see what is happening NOW in our organization, or manufacturing factility, or sales organization. Not just what did happen and what might happen. But what is happening now. Then we can move to the last stage and actively respond to what is happening.
As always, beware of automating bad analysis techniques.