WHAT IS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE?

The term Business Intelligence (BI) represents the tools and systems that play a key role in the strategic planning process of the corporation. These systems allow a company to gather, store, access and analyze corporate data to aid in decision-making. Generally these systems will illustrate business intelligence in the areas of customer profiling, customer support, market research, market segmentation, product profitability, statistical analysis, and inventory and distribution analysis to name a few.

Business intelligence has two basic different meanings related to the use of the term intelligence. The primary, less frequently, is the human intelligence capacity applied in business affairs/activities. Intelligence of business is a new field of the investigation of the application of human cognitive faculties and artificial intelligence technologies to the managerial intelligent decision support systems for different business problems, see for example BI as a cognitive capacity.

The second, which is the subject of this article, relates to the intelligence as information valued for its currency and relevance. It is expert information, knowledge and technologies efficient in the management of organizational and individual business. Therefore, in this sense, business intelligence is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, providing access to, and analyzing data for the purpose of helping enterprise users make better business decisions. The term implies having a comprehensive knowledge of all of the factors that affect your business. It is imperative that you have an in depth knowledge about factors such as your customers, competitors, business partners, economic environment, and internal operations to make effective and good quality business decisions. Business intelligence enables you to make these kinds of decisions.

Business Intelligence should not be confused with competitive intelligence, which is a separate business discipline.

From: Superfactory