What Exactly Is Business Intelligence Anyway?
How can we define business intelligence?
Are all the bog standard analytics packages out there all business intelligence? How about charts, tables and executive dashboards? What about data warehousing, performance reports and financial reporting? Is the data in an excel spreadsheet business intelligence? If you check out some online definitions, you might read “business intelligence is a term that refers to a variety of software applications which is used to organize an organization’s raw data.” While this term is somewhat helpful, it doesn’t go very far to help us gain true intelligence from our data.
IT experts will all give different definitions of what business intelligence really is. One former consultant at Forrester has said “Business Intelligence is the application of analytic techniques to information about business conditions in order to improve them—in an automated fashion, with human interpretation and response. The vagueness of many of these terms means that dozens of vendors and analysts can redefine the category at will—and do, often.“
Business intelligence is intelligent decision making
The true definition of business intelligence to us is that business intelligence is the process of extracting useful decision-making information from your data stores. These data stores can be sales records, financial records, customer data or pretty much any kind of data your business has accumulated. Being able to process and derive useful information from this data is the true heart of business intelligence, and the important decisions it helps managers make ring true to the word “intelligence”.
Check out this Free report on the 'Best Practices for Mobile Business Intelligence' and develop your understanding of Business Intelligence even further.
