What Is Business Intelligence?

DESCRIPTION:

The term “Business Intelligence” (BI) encompasses the tools and techniques that play a significant role in the strategic planning process of a business. These systems allow business leaders to generate, store, and analyze data in order to aid in decision-making.

Identifying and incorporating business intelligence strategies into a company’s business planning is the key to become and to remain a forward-thinking enterprise. Business intelligence application can be an important assistant in decision-making for an entire enterprise, a department, a unit, or a single manager. Business intelligence applications can be:

• Mission-critical and integral to an enterprise's operations or irregular to meet a special need
• Company-wide or local to one division, department, unit, or project
• Centrally initiated or driven by user demand

GOALS:

The main goal of business intelligence is to provide sufficient information for making strategic decisions. Depending on the aim of the business decision(s) at hand, business intelligence methods can provide information about new or emerging opportunities, or can even predict future activities.

Business intelligence data can be used for a wide range of uses, but typically has the greatest impact on a company’s bottom line when it is applied to tasks such as prospect identification, competitor profiling, industry monitoring, assessment of market opportunity and risk, and customer relationship management.

OUTCOMES:

Data generation and analysis tools can help business leaders extract valuable information from a sea of data. Correct utilization of business intelligence data allows a company’s leaders to perform fast, or even real- time business analysis. Therefore, by improving the efficacy of business decisions, business intelligence can improve the overall performance of a company’s operations.