Business intelligence (BI) refers to computer-based techniques used in identifying, extracting and analyzing business data, such as sales revenue by products and/or departments, or by associated costs and incomes.
BI technologies provide historical, current and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of business intelligence technologies are reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining and predictive analytics.
Business intelligence aims to support better business decision-making. Thus a BI system can be called a decision support system (DSS).
Though the term business intelligence is sometimes used as a synonym for competitive intelligence, because they both support decision making, BI uses technologies, processes, and applications to analyze mostly internal, structured data and business processes while competitive intelligence gathers, analyzes and disseminates information with a topical focus on company competitors. Business intelligence understood broadly can include the subset of competitive intelligence.
BI applications use data gathered from a data warehouse or a data mart. However, not all data warehouses are used for business intelligence, nor do all business intelligence applications require a data warehouse.
Business intelligence also includes technologies such as data integration, data quality, data warehousing, master data management, text and content analytics, and many others that the market sometimes lumps into the Information Management segment.
Business Intelligence can be applied to the following business purposes (MARCKM), in order to drive business value:
- Measurement – program that creates a hierarchy of Performance Metrics and Benchmarking that informs business leaders about progress towards business goals.
- Analytics – program that builds quantitative processes for a business to arrive at optimal decisions and to perform Business Knowledge Discovery. Frequently involves: data mining, Statistical Analysis, Predictive Analytics, Predictive Modeling, Business Process Modeling
- Reporting/Enterprise Reporting – program that builds infrastructure for Strategic Reporting to serve the Strategic management of a business, NOT Operational Reporting. Frequently involves: Data visualization, Executive information system, OLAP
- Collaboration/Collaboration platform – program that gets different areas (both inside and outside the business) to work together through Data sharing and Electronic Data interchange.
- Knowledge Management – program to make the company data driven through strategies and practices to identify, create, represent, distribute, and enable adoption of insights and experiences that are true business knowledge. Knowledge Management leads to Learning Management and Regulatory Compliance/Compliance.
