Purpose - This paper aims to explain why service-oriented business intelligence (SOBI) happened, the new development and how to make a strategy to introduce daily decision support in the retail trade. Design/methodology/ approach - The diffusion of business intelligence (BI) tools is operationalized on Rogers' innovation theory. Findings - The article answered the question: How to draft a BI strategy for all parts of the retail enterprise? By excellent data warehouse quality; choosing an area for common decision support; starting simply, with metrics (sale, gross margin, number of customers) to get users started and then continue the iterative process of practicing more comparing and personalized BI. Practical implications - Retailers meet a changeable world around where business decisions must be taken daily. In the retail industry, the customer's current demands control the supply of commodities, inventories and crew. Retailers have enterprise applications designed for their business processes, but also daily want to measure the performance. It is a question of from existing enterprise applications and databases design new decision processes and business flows that currently request BI data to be presented directly to operative responsible staff. Originality/value - Explains why there are attempts to combine the two broad architectural paradigms BI and service orientation. Service-oriented architecture, BI, on line analytical processing, extract, transform and load, SOBI are discussed in detail.