What is Business Intelligence?
Business intelligence is a general term used to refer to a number of activities a company may undertake to gather information about their market or their competitors. Some areas often included under the blanket heading of business intelligence are: competition analysis, market analysis, and industry analysis. Some people also consider industrial espionage that operates for information-gathering purposes to be a form of business intelligence. In most cases, a company will either hire an outside agency or create their own dedicated business intelligence group. This group will then gather information from inside the company about how well the company has been performing and where improvements may be made. The group then looks to outside sources, which may include public records of other businesses in the same sector, market analysis by third-parties, and customer survey information. The group may then delve further into specific competitors, both by examining their public information and
by Dan Power Editor, DSSResources.com Business intelligence (BI) is often viewed as a term similar to military or competitive intelligence. And hence, the presumed purpose of BI is to gather and provide information to help managers make more “intelligent” decisions. This interpretation of the term may be appropriate for describing the activities of a staff group tasked with gathering information, e.g., a business intelligence unit, but it works less well for explaining IS/IT technologies and applications. Information Systems vendors and analysts tend to use the term for a category of software tools that can be used to extract and analyze data from corporate databases. The most commonly used business intelligence software is known as a query and reporting tool. Also, business intelligence is a term that some financial analysts and commentators use for categorizing a small group of software vendors and their products. A number of commentators identify the following companies as major BI
Business Intelligence is a broad field of study. The major thrust of business intelligence theory looks at certain factors to make high quality decisions. These factors include customers, competitors, business partners, economic environment and internal operations. Here is some more information on how these factors help businesses make quality decisions.
Business intelligence, or BI, is an umbrella term that refers to a variety of software applications used to analyze an organization’s raw data. BI as a discipline is made up of several related activities, including data mining, online analytical processing, querying and reporting. Companies use BI to improve decision making, cut costs and identify new business opportunities. BI is more than just corporate reporting and more than a set of tools to coax data out of enterprise systems. CIOs use BI to identify inefficient business processes that are ripe for re-engineering. With today’s BI tools, business folks can jump in and start analyzing data themselves, rather than wait for IT to run complex reports. This democratization of information access helps users back up—with hard numbers—business decisions that would otherwise be based only on gut feelings and anecdotes. Although BI holds great promise, implementations can be dogged by technical and cultural challenges. Executives have to en
Updated: 2008-08-21 Business intelligence (BI) simplifies information discovery and analysis, making it possible for decision-makers at all levels of an organization to more easily access, understand, analyze, collaborate, and act on information, anytime and anywhere. This definition for BI demonstrates that traditional analyst-driven BI applications have evolved to include multiple initiatives to measure, manage, and improve on the performance of individuals, processes, teams, and business units. For this reason, Microsoft delivers BI tools that can give every employee access to the data required to make informed decisions and that have the flexibility to work the way they do. As a result of extending the definition of BI, Microsoft sees information and insight flowing steadily between three main categories of BI: personal (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=125349), team (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=125350), and organizational (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=12
