Business Intelligence - What is it?

Business Intelligence (BI) gives you the ability to gain insight into your business or organization by understanding your company's information assets. These assets can include customer databases, supply chain information, personnel data, manufacturing, and sales and marketing activity as well as any other source of information critical to your operation. Business intelligence software allows you to integrate these disparate data sources into a single coherent framework for real-time reporting and detailed analysis by anyone in your extended enterprise – customers, partners, employees, managers, and executives.

In today's fiercely competitive market, companies must be adept at analyzing data in order to spot sales trends and do product analysis. Companies need to ask key questions, such as: How many seconds did an online shopper spend looking at a particular item? What does a five-year history of that customer's purchases look like? What are the characteristics of the most profitable 10 percent of the company's customers?
But gathering countless factoids won't give any company a competitive advantage. In fact, the more information a company pours into typical business-intelligence packages, the more difficult, time-consuming, and expensive it becomes to do benchmarking and market study analysis.
To see a real payoff, organizations need to consolidate business intelligence data that is often segregated between divisions. That's the only way to get a single view of business operations.

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