Business Intelligence (BI)
What is Business Intelligence?
Business intelligence (BI) refers to the technologies, applications, and practices used to collect, integrate, analyze, and present data to help organizations make more informed business decisions. The goal of BI is to provide stakeholders with the information they need to make better decisions by identifying patterns, trends, and opportunities in the data. This information can be used to optimize business processes, improve performance, and make more informed decisions. BI typically involves the use of various data visualization and reporting tools, as well as data warehousing and data mining technologies- Snippet from Wikipedia: Business intelligence
Business intelligence (BI) consists of strategies, methodologies, and technologies used by enterprises for data analysis and management of business information. Common functions of BI technologies include reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, dashboard development, data mining, process mining, complex event processing, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, predictive analytics, and prescriptive analytics.
BI tools can handle large amounts of structured and sometimes unstructured data to help organizations identify, develop, and otherwise create new strategic business opportunities. They aim to allow for the easy interpretation of these big data. Identifying new opportunities and implementing an effective strategy based on insights is assumed to potentially provide businesses with a competitive market advantage and long-term stability, and help them take strategic decisions.
Business intelligence can be used by enterprises to support a wide range of business decisions ranging from operational to strategic. Basic operating decisions include product positioning or pricing. Strategic business decisions involve priorities, goals, and directions at the broadest level. In all cases, BI is believed to be most effective when it combines data derived from the market in which a company operates (external data) with data from company sources internal to the business such as financial and operations data (internal data). When combined, external and internal data can provide a complete picture which, in effect, creates an "intelligence" that cannot be derived from any singular set of data.
Among their many uses, business intelligence tools empower organizations to gain insight into new markets, to assess demand and suitability of products and services for different market segments, and to gauge the impact of marketing efforts.
BI applications use data gathered from a data warehouse (DW) or from a data mart, and the concepts of BI and DW combine as "BI/DW" or as "BIDW". A data warehouse contains a copy of analytical data that facilitates decision support.
External links:
- Business intelligence: A complete overview — tableau.com