Business intelligence (BI)

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Business intelligence (BI) refers to skills, knowledge, technologies, applications, quality, risks, security issues and practices used to help abusiness to acquire a better understanding of market behavior and commercial context. For this purpose it undertakes the collection, integration, analysis, interpretation and presentation of business information. By extension, "business intelligence" may refer to the collected information itself or the explicit knowledge developed from the information.

BI applications provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations, most often using data already gathered into a data warehouse or a data mart and occasionally working from operational data. Software elements support the use of this information by assisting in the extraction, analysis, and reporting of information. Common functionality of business intelligence applications includes reporting, OLAP, analytics, dashboards, scorecards, data mining, corporate performance management (CPM), and predictive analysis.

BI applications tackle sales, production, financial, and many other sources of business data for purposes that include, notably, business performance management. BI operatives may gather information on comparable companies to produce benchmarks.

Business intelligence — the term dates at least to 1958 — aims to support better business decision-making.^[1] Thus one can also characterize a BI system as a decision support system (DSS):^[2] BI is sometimes used interchangeably with briefing books, report and query tools and executive information systems. In general, business intelligence systems are data-driven DSS.

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