Business intelligence (BI) and analysis refer to the infrastructure, tools, applications, and other collective resources that generate data and information, which in turn inform how companies make decisions, discover revenue opportunities, and evaluate performance. Business intelligence (BI) is software that ingests business data and presents it in easy-to-use views, such as reports, dashboards, tables, and graphs. BI tools allow business users to access different types of data (historical and current, third-party and internal), as well as semi-structured and unstructured data, such as those from social networks. Users can analyze this information to gain insights into the company's performance.
By providing an accurate picture of the company at a specific time, BI provides the organization with the means to design a business strategy based on factual data. Advanced BI and analytics systems can also integrate artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to automate and streamline complex tasks. Learn how companies use artificial intelligence, learn about its benefits and advantages, and much more. Organizations can use information obtained from business intelligence and data analysis to improve business decisions, identify problems or issues, detect market trends, and find new revenues or business opportunities. The business intelligence software consults the warehouse and presents the results to the user in the form of reports, graphs and maps.
Instead of using the best guesses, they can base their decisions on what their business data tells them, whether in relation to production, supply chain, customers, or market trends. Even without IT, business intelligence analysts and users needed extensive training to successfully query and analyze their data. Business intelligence helps organizations become data-driven companies, improve performance and gain a competitive advantage. They need the right tools to aggregate business information from anywhere, analyze it, discover patterns and find solutions.
A data warehouse aggregates data from several data sources into a central system to support business analysis and reporting. The term business intelligence was first used in 1865 by author Richard Millar Devens, quoting a banker who collected information about the market before his competitors. Business intelligence gives organizations the ability to ask questions in simple language and get answers they can understand. Some newer business intelligence solutions can extract and ingest raw data directly using technology such as Hadoop, but data warehouses are still the preferred data source in many cases.
In 1958, an IBM computer scientist named Hans Peter Luhn explored the potential of using technology to gather business intelligence.
