What is Business Intelligence?

So what is Business Intelligence BI and how is it used?

Business Intelligence is a popular and often used term that covers the technology, software, concepts and methods used to improve business decision making.

Through the use of specialized software, large volumes of data can be extracted from transactional databases, transformed and cleansed, and loaded into a data warehouse. This can then be used directly as a data source for reporting or further agrregated to form OLAP cubes, which greatly increase the speed at which information becomes available for decision-making.

As Business Intelligence covers many areas, it is worth clarifying the term by having a definition of Business Intelligence. You may also be asking yourself Why Business Intelligence? or What is the benefit of Business Intelligence? These are very important questions. Business Intelligence is not cheap. It is not something which can be rapidly introduced. To deliver the consistent and reliable results demanded by your users, proper analysis of requirements needs to be made, a determination made whether a Business Intelligence solution is approproate and the benefits of such an implementation. These questions should hopefully be answered by following the highlighted links.

What Is Business Intelligence?
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