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Business intelligence (BI) refers to skills, technologies, applications and practices used to help a business
Business

A business is a legally recognized organization designed to provide good s and/or Service to consumers. Businesses are predominant in capitalism economies, most being privately owned and formed to earn profit that will increase the wealth of its owners....
 acquire a better understanding of its commercial context. Business intelligence may also refer to the collected information itself.

BI applications provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of business intelligence applications are reporting, OLAP
OLAP

Online analytical processing, or OLAP , is an approach to quickly answer multi-dimensional analytical queries. OLAP is part of the broader category of business intelligence, which also encompasses relational reporting and data mining....
, analytics
Analytics

The simplest definition of Analytics is "the science of analysis". A simple and practical definition, however, would be how an entity arrives at an optimal or realistic decision based on existing data....
, data mining
Data mining

Data mining is the process of extracting hidden patterns from data. As more data is gathered, with the amount of data doubling every three years, data mining is becoming an increasingly important tool to transform this data into information....
, business performance management
Business performance management

Business performance management consists of a set of processes that help organizations optimize their business performance. It provides a framework for organizing, automating and analyzing business methodologies, metrics, processes and systems that drive business performance....
, benchmarks
Benchmarking

Benchmarking is the process of comparing the cost, cycle time, productivity, or quality of a specific process or method to another that is widely considered to be an industry standard or best practice....
, text mining
Text mining

Text mining, sometimes alternately referred to as text data mining, roughly equivalent to text analytics, refers generally to the process of deriving high-quality information from text....
, and predictive analytics.

Business intelligence often aims to support better business decision-making. Thus a BI system can be called a decision support system
Decision support system

Decision support systems constitute a class of computer-based information systems including knowledge based system that support decision-making activities....
 (DSS).

958 Hans Peter Luhn
Hans Peter Luhn

Hans Peter Luhn was a computer science for IBM, and creator of the Luhn algorithm and Key Word in Context indexing. He was awarded over 80 patents....
 defined business intelligence as: "the ability to apprehend the interrelationships of presented facts in such a way as to guide action towards a desired goal".

In 1989 Howard Dresner (later a Gartner Group analyst) proposed BI as an umbrella term to describe "concepts and methods to improve business decision making by using fact-based support systems." It was not until the late 1990s that this usage was widespread.

n BI applications use data gathered from a data warehouse
Data warehouse

Data warehouse is a repository of an organization's electronically stored data. Data warehouses are designed to facilitate reporting and analysis....
 or a data mart
Data mart

A data mart is a subset of an organizational data store, usually oriented to a specific purpose or major data subject, that may be distributed to support business needs....
.






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Business intelligence (BI) refers to skills, technologies, applications and practices used to help a business
Business

A business is a legally recognized organization designed to provide good s and/or Service to consumers. Businesses are predominant in capitalism economies, most being privately owned and formed to earn profit that will increase the wealth of its owners....
 acquire a better understanding of its commercial context. Business intelligence may also refer to the collected information itself.

BI applications provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of business intelligence applications are reporting, OLAP
OLAP

Online analytical processing, or OLAP , is an approach to quickly answer multi-dimensional analytical queries. OLAP is part of the broader category of business intelligence, which also encompasses relational reporting and data mining....
, analytics
Analytics

The simplest definition of Analytics is "the science of analysis". A simple and practical definition, however, would be how an entity arrives at an optimal or realistic decision based on existing data....
, data mining
Data mining

Data mining is the process of extracting hidden patterns from data. As more data is gathered, with the amount of data doubling every three years, data mining is becoming an increasingly important tool to transform this data into information....
, business performance management
Business performance management

Business performance management consists of a set of processes that help organizations optimize their business performance. It provides a framework for organizing, automating and analyzing business methodologies, metrics, processes and systems that drive business performance....
, benchmarks
Benchmarking

Benchmarking is the process of comparing the cost, cycle time, productivity, or quality of a specific process or method to another that is widely considered to be an industry standard or best practice....
, text mining
Text mining

Text mining, sometimes alternately referred to as text data mining, roughly equivalent to text analytics, refers generally to the process of deriving high-quality information from text....
, and predictive analytics.

Business intelligence often aims to support better business decision-making. Thus a BI system can be called a decision support system
Decision support system

Decision support systems constitute a class of computer-based information systems including knowledge based system that support decision-making activities....
 (DSS).

History

In 1958 Hans Peter Luhn
Hans Peter Luhn

Hans Peter Luhn was a computer science for IBM, and creator of the Luhn algorithm and Key Word in Context indexing. He was awarded over 80 patents....
 defined business intelligence as: "the ability to apprehend the interrelationships of presented facts in such a way as to guide action towards a desired goal".

In 1989 Howard Dresner (later a Gartner Group analyst) proposed BI as an umbrella term to describe "concepts and methods to improve business decision making by using fact-based support systems." It was not until the late 1990s that this usage was widespread.

Business intelligence and data warehousing

Often BI applications use data gathered from a data warehouse
Data warehouse

Data warehouse is a repository of an organization's electronically stored data. Data warehouses are designed to facilitate reporting and analysis....
 or a data mart
Data mart

A data mart is a subset of an organizational data store, usually oriented to a specific purpose or major data subject, that may be distributed to support business needs....
. However, not all data warehouses are used for business intelligence nor do all business intelligence applications require a data warehouse.

Competitive intelligence

The term business intelligence is often used as a synonym for competitive intelligence
Competitive intelligence

A broad definition of Competitive Intelligence is the action of gathering, analyzing, and applying information about products, domain constituents, customers, and competitors for the short term and long term planning needs of an organization....
.

Meteorological Intelligence

The term meteorological intelligence
Meteorological intelligence

Meteorological intelligence is information measured, gathered, compiled, exploited, analyzed and disseminated by Meteorology, Climatology and Hydrology to characterize the current state and/or predict the future state of the Atmosphere at a given location and time....
 is a broad term that is associated with information provided to decision makers in one of a number of weather sensitive business areas including: Energy, forestry
Forestry

Forestry is the art and science of managing forests, tree plantations, and related natural resources. Silviculture, a related science, involves the growing and tending of trees and forests....
, agriculture
Agriculture

Agriculture refers to the production of food and goods through farming and forestry. Agriculture was the key development that led to the rise of civilization, with the animal husbandry of domestication animals and plants creating food surpluses that enabled the development of more Population density and Social stratification societies....
, telecommunications
Telecommunication

Telecommunication is the assisted Transmission of Signal over a distance for the purpose of communication. In earlier times, this may have involved the use of smoke signals, Drum , Semaphore line, flag signals or heliograph....
, transportation
Transport

Transport or transportation is the movement of passenger and cargo from one location to another. Transport is performed by various modes of transport, such as aviation, rail transport, road transport, ship transport, cable transport, pipeline transport and space transport....
, aviation
Aviation

File:Norwegian military Bell 412SP helicopters.jpgAviation refers to activities involving man-made flying devices , including the people, organizations, and regulatory bodies involved with them....
, entertainment
Entertainment

Entertainment is an activity designed to give people pleasure or relaxation. An audience may participate in the entertainment passively as in watching opera or a movie, or actively as in games....
, retail
Retailing

Retailing consists of the sales of goods or merchandise from a fixed location, such as a department store or kiosk, or by post, in small or individual lots for direct consumption by the purchaser....
 and construction
Construction

In the fields of architecture and civil engineering, construction is a process that consists of the building or assembling of infrastructure. Far from being a single activity, large scale construction is a feat of multitasking....
. It is considered a key aspect of weather risk management
Weather risk management

Weather risk management is a type of risk management done by organizations to address potential financial losses caused by unusual weather....
 for the legal and insurance
Insurance

Insurance, in law and economics, is a form of risk management primarily used to Hedge against the risk of a contingent loss. Insurance is defined as the equitable transfer of the risk of a loss, from one entity to another, in exchange for a premium, and can be thought of as a guaranteed small loss to prevent a large, possibly devastating los...
 industries.

The future of business intelligence

A 2009 Gartner Group paper predicted these developments in business intelligence market .
  • Because of lack of information, processes, and tools, through 2012, more than 35 per cent of the top 5,000 global companies will regularly fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business and markets.
  • By 2012, business units will control at least 40 per cent of the total budget for business intelligence.
  • By 2010, 20 per cent of organizations will have an industry-specific analytic application delivered via software as a service
    Software as a Service

    Software as a Service is a model of software deployment where an application is licensed for use as a service provided to customers on demand. On demand licensing and use alleviates the customer's burden of equipping a device with every application....
     as a standard component of their business intelligence portfolio.
  • In 2009, collaborative decision making
    Group decision making

    Groups decision making is decision making in groups consisting of multiple members/entity. The challenge of group decision is deciding what action a group should take....
     will emerge as a new product category that combines social software
    Social software

    Social software encompasses a range of software systems that allow users to interact and share data. This computer-mediated communication has become very popular with social sites like MySpace and Facebook, media sites like Flickr and YouTube, and commercial sites like Amazon.com and eBay....
     with business intelligence platform capabilities.
  • By 2012, one-third of analytic applications applied to business processes will be delivered through coarse-grained
    Granularity

    Granularity is the extent to which a system is broken down into small parts, either the system itself or its description or observation. It is the "extent to which a larger entity is subdivided....
     application mashups
    Mashup (web application hybrid)

    In web development, a mashup is a Web application that combines data from one or more sources into a single integrated tool. The term Mashup implies easy, fast integration, frequently done by access to open APIs and data sources to produce results that were not the original reason for producing the raw source data....
    .

See also


  • Analytics
    Analytics

    The simplest definition of Analytics is "the science of analysis". A simple and practical definition, however, would be how an entity arrives at an optimal or realistic decision based on existing data....
  • Business Intelligence 2.0
    Business Intelligence 2.0

    Business Intelligence 2.0 is a term referring to a new generation of Business Intelligence software that is more proactive than reactive . The first generation of Business Intelligence analyzed information involved in business oriented decisions while the next generation helps make decisions as or before events happen....
  • Business intelligence tools
    Business intelligence tools

    Business intelligence tools are a type of application software designed to report, analyze and present data. The tools generally read data that have been previously stored, often, though not necessarily, in a data warehouse or data mart....
  • Dashboards (management information systems)
  • Document Intelligence
    Intelligent document

    Intelligent document is a general term to describe electronic documents with more functionality than a page designed to emulate paper. Formats include PDF from Adobe Systems, InfoPath from Microsoft, Cardiff Software and XForms from W3C, and the non-programming solutions DocFire, Exari and Intelledox....
  • Integrated business planning
    Integrated business planning

    Integrated business planning refers to the technologies, applications and processes of connecting the planning function across the enterprise to improve organizational alignment and financial performance....
  • Location intelligence
    Location intelligence

    Location Intelligence is the capacity to organize and understand complex phenomena through the use of geographic relationships inherent in all information....
  • Meteorological intelligence
    Meteorological intelligence

    Meteorological intelligence is information measured, gathered, compiled, exploited, analyzed and disseminated by Meteorology, Climatology and Hydrology to characterize the current state and/or predict the future state of the Atmosphere at a given location and time....
  • OLAP
  • Operational Intelligence
    Operational Intelligence

    Operational Intelligence focuses on providing real-time monitoring of business processes and activities as they are executed within computer systems, and in assisting in optimizing these activities and processes by identifying and detecting situations that correspond to interruptions and bottlenecks....
  • Predictive analytics
    Predictive analytics

    Predictive analytics encompasses a variety of techniques from statistics and data mining that analyze current and historical data to make predictions about future events....
  • Process mining
    Process mining

    Process mining techniques allow for the analysis of business processes based on event logs. They are often used when no formal description of the process can be obtained by other means, or when the quality of an existing documentation is questionable....
  • Sales intelligence
    Sales intelligence

    The term Sales intelligence refers to technologies, applications and practices for the collection, integration, analysis, and presentation of Sales information....