Business Intelligence encompasses a range of techniques to collect, integrate, analyze, and present information about business operations. Business Intelligence tools draw upon historical data contained in a relational database, Data Warehouse. or Data Mart. Current information is compared with historical data as well as predictions from models to generate reports that help decision makers evaluate performance. Data Visualization techniques combined with Data Mining tools may be applied to financial, production, and sales data to identify trends through the use of statistical analysis and machine learning techniques.

In general, Business Intelligence is a newer description of techniques traditionally associated with OLAP and Decision Support Systems (DSS). The primary difference is that Business Intelligence is often integrated into Executive Information Systems (EIS), Management Information Systems (MIS), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to generate reports, dashboards, and scorecards that are used directly by executives and managers, rather than by a technical analyst. Reports may be generated immediate in contrast to a monthly or weekly reporting cycle. This trend is augmented by the use of Service Oriented Architectures based on Web Services that allow end-to-end enterprise data collection as it occurs.

Tags: business intelligence, data mining