Part 2 — What is Business Intelligence?

Business intelligence is the use of an organization’s disparate data to provide meaningful information and analyses to employees, customers, suppliers, and partners for more efficient and effective decision-making. It transforms information into actionable strategies and tactics to improve the efficiency of the enterprise, to reduce costs, to attract and retain customers, to improve sales (with real-time sales analysis), and to provide many other significant benefits. (Note: this also includes using data insight for business insight)

White Paper: The Evolution of Real-Time Business Intelligence

As information technology evolved over the years, enterprises automated more and more of their operations. A great deal of very valuable data resided underutilized in these systems. Data found in sales, accounting, production, human resources, and many other systems could yield significant information to provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations.

For example, some typical instances of the use of business intelligence include:

RTBI Index

• RTBI Overview
• Part 1 — Evolution of RTBI
• Part 2 — What is BI?
• Part 3 — History of BI
• Part 4 — EAI
• Part 5 — Operational BI
• Part 6 — RTBI
• Part 7 — The ODS: The Next Evolutionary Step
• Part 8 — HPE Shadowbase RTBI Solutions
• RTBI Summary