What is Business Intelligence?

Definition: Business Intelligence(BI) is the delivery of accurate, useful information to the appropriate decision makers within the necessary time frame to support effective decision making.

Or

Business Intelligence (BI) refers to skills, processes, technologies, applications and practices used to support decision making.(Source: wiki)

BI uses technologies, processes, and applications to analyze mostly internal, structured data and business processes.

There are bunch of other videos online explaining the definition of Business Intelligence.  However I felt this video to be more simple and yet clear in understanding.

To facilitate effective decision making there are different BI technologies available to process and analyse different Business processes and transactions to present future desired business outcomes. 

All the BI technologies uses BI Tools that are like software applications designed to report, analyse and present data.

The common functions of BI technologies can be listed as below:

1. Reporting
2. Online analytical processing(OLAP)
3. Analytics
4. Data mining
5. Business performance management
6. Benchmarking
7. Text mining 
8. Predictive analytics

 The famous proprietory BI tools are listed below how ever a comprehensive list can be found( here)

1. Cognos(IBM)
2.  Hyperion(ORACLE)
3. SQL SERVER Analysis and Reporting services(MICROSOFT)
4. Sybase
5. Teradata
6. Business Objects(SAP)

 BI tools use information stored in Data Warehouses and Data Marts but all tools do not require them.

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