What is Business Intelligence?

Business intelligence is a broad set of applications, technologies and knowledge for gathering and analyzing data for the purpose of helping users make better business decisions.
The main challenge of Business Intelligence is to gather and serve organized information regarding all relevant factors that drive the business and enable end-users to access that knowledge easily and efficiently and in effect maximize the success of an organization.

Business intelligence produces analysis and provides in depth knowledge about performance indicators such as company's customers, competitors, business counterparts, economic environment and internal operations to help making effective and good quality business decisions.

From a technical standpoint, the most important areas that Business Intelligence (BI) covers are:

DW - Data warehousing - architecture, modeling, managing, processing ETL process and data integration Reporting, Information visualization and Dashboards OLAP - Online Analytical Processing and multidimensional analysis Data cleansing and data quality management Performance management Data mining, statistical analysis, forecasting MIS - Management Information Systems CRM - Customer Relationship Management

Business intelligence life cycle

Figure 10.2. Major components in the business intelligence life cycle

Less Frequent Change/Higher Risk and Cost	Periodic Change	Frequent Change/Lower Risk and Cost
Hardware	Physical tables	Business views
Software	Custom-coded applications	Reports
Source systems	ETL processes	Dashboards
	Code files and hierarchy definitions	Calculation of key performance indicators within the business view, scorecard, or dashboard
	OLAP database structure