Business Intelligence systems collect and process data from various business sources, providing fast information utilized by management.
BI tools access and analyze datasets and present findings in reports, summaries, toolbars, graphs, charts and charts to provide users with detailed information about the state of the business.
The term business intelligence also often refers to a set of tools that provide quick access to information about an organization’s current status, based on available data. A variety of different types of tools fall into the business information terminology.
Some information about the current state of an organization is the following:
- Dashboards
- Visualizations
- Reporting
- Data mining
- ETL (extract-transfer-load — tools that import data from one data store into another)
- OLAP (online analytical processing)
Business Intelligence software systems and applications make every function more powerful and valuable to the entrepreneurs who use them. The entrepreneur can look at reports from last year’s sales, but also take forecasts for next year’s sales and then add to these IT questions the possible scenarios like: What if we did the X instead for Y.
BI tools are a set of methodologies, processes, platforms, applications, architectures, and technologies that turn raw data into important and useful information used to enable more effective strategies, tactics, and operational knowledge and decision-making.
