Business Intelligence (BI)
To gauge a company's Business Intelligence (BI) is to gauge their ability to transform raw, unadulterated data, into meaningful, actionable information and recurring metrics. Companies use a combination of theory, methodology and technology to complete this transformation.
Business intelligence emerged as the amount of data companies were gathering increased. Suddenly there was so much information. Simple analysis was no longer sufficient. While the benefit of having vast amounts of data is that there are limitless insights and underlying patterns to be siphoned from data, the challenge became making sense of it efficiently. This is where business intelligence technology emerged.
Business intelligence technology organizes historical and predictive data in order to provide businesses a multidimensional look at business operations. Through reporting, visualization, dashboards, analytics, data mining, slicing and dicing, and benchmarking, business intelligence allows users to organize large amounts of data so businesses can identify and act on underlying trends easily.