Business Intelligence (BI)

Describes functionality that allows corporate information to be analyzed and assessed in a whole range of different ways. One of the fundamental assets of all businesses is data. The first part of generating value from data is to place the data into a business context, turning it into meaningful information. Once this is done, it now becomes possible to gather, correlate, and analyze the information. Business intelligence software, at its core, is responsible for the analysis and reporting steps. Arguably it can also cover the information gathering and correlation steps, as well as providing some support for analysis-based actions. Typically BI software will assemble the information into a pool that it can understand and then provide various different "slice and dice" options to mine the information as required and to display the results.