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What is Business Intelligence?
July 8th, 2010 by admin
The phrase business intelligence is commonly used to refer to computer-based techniques used in data research, fact checking and analyzing business data, such as sales revenue by products and departments or associated costs and incomes. Business intelligence technologies provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of Business Intelligence technologies include reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, and predictive analytics. Business Intelligence is often used to support better business decision-making in a corporate environment, though the therm business intelligence is also used as a synonym for competitive intelligence. Business intelligence is often used in order to support decision making. Business intelligence (BI) is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, compiling, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help enterprises and business owners make better business decisions. Business intelligence applications include the activities of decision support systems, query and reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), statistical analysis, forecasting, and data mining. Business intelligence applications can be mission-critical and integral to an enterprise’s operations or occasional to meet a special requirement, enterprise-wide or local to one division, department, or project and centrally initiated or driven by user demand. Brief history of business intelligenceIn a 1958 article, IBM researcher Hans Peter Luhn used the term business intelligence. He defined it 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) referred to business intelligence 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. Often business intelligence applications use data gathered from a data warehouse or a data mart. However, not all data warehouses are used for business intelligence, nor do all business intelligenceapplications require a data warehouse.