Business Intelligence (BI) is a broad category of computer software solutions that enables a company or organization to gain insight into its critical operations through reporting applications and analysis tools. BI applications may include a variety of components such as tabular reports, spreadsheets, charts, and dashboards. Although traditional business intelligence systems were delivered via host terminals or paper reports, the typical modern deployment of a BI application is over the web, via Internet or intranet connections. It is also possible, and becoming more popular, to develop interactive BI apps optimized for mobile devices such as tablets and smart phones, and for e-mail.
Well-designed BI applications can give anyone in your company the ability to make better decisions by quickly understanding the various “information assets” in your organization and how these interact with each other. These assets can include customer databases, supply chain information, personnel data, manufacturing, product data, sales and marketing activity, as well as any other source of information critical to your operation. A robust BI application, which includes integration and data cleansing functions, can allow you to integrate these disparate data sources into a single coherent framework for real-time reporting and detailed analysis by anyone in your extended enterprise – customers, partners, employees, managers, and executives.
BI software will empower your organization to:
- Process requests quickly, intelligently, and efficiently
- Respond faster and more efficiently to changing conditions affecting your organization
- Make your greatest asset – information – part of your organization’s natural culture
- Transform raw data into intuitive, illustrative enterprise reports quickly and easily
- Enhance reporting systems by incorporating transactional forms, as well as data maintenance and update capabilities
- Deliver usable information to both local and remote workers in the format that works best for them, whether it’s html, Microsoft Excel, Adobe PDF, e-mail or active technologies with built-in analytics capabilities.
