"Business Intelligence is the art of gaining business advantage from data".

It allows businesses to leverage their information assets as a competitive advantage. It allows businesses to better understand the demand side of the business and manage customer relationships. It allows organizations to monitor results of change – both positive and negative.

It creates customer intelligence from the mountains of disconnected customer data companies collect every day. The payback comes in improved return on market investment, higher customer retention, and increased customer profitability.

Business Intelligence is used to answer queries like:

• Who are my best and worst customers (and therefore, where should I concentrate my future sales efforts)
• What parameters affect my sales (Is there a brilliant sales person? Has a campaign been successful?)
• What advantages does my business offer customers, as compared with the competition?
• Where are we making/losing money (in terms of geography, product line, campaigns, etc.)

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Top management usually lacks an integrated tool to analyze the operative and financial indicators from a decision-making perspective. Data resides on different systems and applications (ERP, CRM, SCM, legacy systems). When information needs arise, a lot of people have to get involved to generate the required reports and usually takes days to have the request fulfilled.

BI puts the required information at the user's fingertips

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If your company suffers from one or more of these problems, there is a good chance a BI initiative may work for you:

• Top management doesn’t have an integrated view of their key performance indicators (KPI) from a decision-making standpoint.
• Since information resides on different applications, lots of people need to get involved to generate the required reports and integrate all the information, usually taking several days to complete.
• Reports with excessive details are frequently generated, which are not easy to assimilate for decision making, and don’t allow interactive comparisons nor trend analysis.
• In larger organizations, oftentimes there isn’t a single version of the truth. That is, concepts and formulas used to generate a particular indicator may differ among business units and geographic locations, making comparisons a painstaking job.

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"Data warehousing is the coordinated, architected, and periodic copying of data from various sources, both inside and outside the enterprise, into an environment optimized for analytical and information processing."

(Alan Simon, Data Warehousing for Dummies.)

In other words, it is the process of transforming data into information and making it available to users in a timely enough manner to make a difference.

A data warehouse, as the name implies, is a data store for a large amount of corporate data. Data warehousing opens new possibilities in terms of decision support systems. Analysts cannot make good decisions unless they have all of the available data. A good corporate data warehouse makes that data readily available. In addition, it makes possible a whole new class of computing applications known as data mining.

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Data mining is sometimes called “data or knowledge discovery” and is the process of automating information discovery. Data mining is the process of analyzing data from different perspectives and summarizing it into useful information.

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