Understanding Business Intelligence and Your Bottom Line

The term “Business Intelligence” and its acronym “BI” are so pervasive in today’s data-intensive lexicon that it’s a challenge to know just what to make of it. If you add in all the new trendy terminology such as business process management (BPM), data mining, data warehousing, business process automation, decision support systems, query and reporting systems, enterprise performance management, executive information systems (EIS), business activity monitoring (BAM), modeling and visualization, and so forth, your head can start spinning.

Here is a workable definition of BI that was provided in a Technology Evaluation report from a Jan. 10, 2005, Technology Evaluation Centers article by Mukhles Zaman titled, “Business Intelligence: Its Ins and Outs”: “BI is neither a product nor a system. It is an umbrella term that combines architectures, applications and databases. It enables the real-time, interactive access, analysis and manipulation of information, which provides the business community with easy access to business data.