INTELLIGENCE
The phrase business intelligence ( BI ) may refer to:
- a set of business processes
- the technology used in these processes, and
- the information obtained from these processes.
Organizations typically gather such information in order to assess the business environment , and cover fields such as marketing research, industry or market research, and competitor analysis. Competitive organizations accumulate business intelligence in order to gains sustainable competitive advantage, and may regard such intelligence as a valuable core competence in some instances.
Persons involved in business intelligence processes may use application software and other technologies to gather, store, analyze, and provide access to data (also known as business intelligence ). Some observers regard BI as the process of enhancing data into information and then into knowledge. The software aims to help people make "better" business decisions by making accurate, current, and relevant information available to them when they need it.
Generally, BI-collectors glean their primary information from internal business sources. Such sources help decision-makers understand how well they have performed. Secondary sources of information include customer needs, customer decision-making processes, the competition and competitive pressures, conditions in relevant industries, and general economic, technological, and cultural trends.
Each business-intelligence system has a specific goal, which derives from an organizational goal or from a vision statement. Both short-term goals (such as quarterly numbers to Wall Street) and long term goals (such as shareholder value, target industry share / size, etc) exist.
Industrial espionage may provide business intelligence by using covert techniques. A gray area exists between "normal" business intelligence and industrial espionage.
Some people use the term "BI" interchangeably with "briefing books" or with "executive information systems". One can regard a business intelligence system as a decision-support system (DSS).
Business performance management offers software-oriented business intelligence systems that some see as a new generation of business intelligence, though most people in the field use the terms interchangeably.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_intelligence
