Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence is a process for increasing the competitive advantage of a business by intelligent use of available data in decision making.

This results in an information flood, from which it is hard to find the relevant information to support decision-making. Therefore a systematic approach is needed for analyzing customers, competitors and suppliers and for foreseeing changes.

Business Intelligence involves query and reporting and is used only for the power user. It is a broad range of software and solutions aimed at collection, consolidation, analysis and providing access to information that allows users across the business to make better decisions. The technology is applied across disciplines and includes software for database query and analysis, multidimensional databases or OLAP tools, data warehousing and data mining, and nowadays web enabled reporting capabilities.

The five key stages of Business Intelligence

Data sourcing
Data Analysis
Situation Awareness
Risk Assessment
Decision Support

Business Intelligence has many distinct advantages:

-- Fosters quicker decision making processes
-- Gives better foresight of probable changes that can occur business-wise.
-- Increased sharing of information within the organization
-- Avoiding overlapping work processes in information
-- Enables better quality of strategic and operative decision-making