Business intelligence (BI) is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help enterprise users make better business decisions. BI applications include the activities of decision support systems, query and reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), statistical analysis, forecasting, and data mining.

Business intelligence applications can be: BI systems provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations, most often using data that has been gathered into a data warehouse or a data mart but sometimes working from operational data. Software elements support reporting, interactive "slice-and-dice" pivot-table analyses, visualization, and statistical data mining. Applications tackle sales, production, financial, and many other sources of business data for purposes that include, notably, business performance management.

A BI tool can be used to answer complex questions, delving deep into your business data to surface valuable answers. An example of such a question might be as follows:

What percentage of our turnover is generated through new clients gained in the same financial year, over the last three years?

The business may be facing a friendly takeover bid and is required to provide information to the prospective buyer. A BI tool can assist in presenting this information quickly and accurately.

There are two defined areas of business management in which purposes for which Business Intelligence can be used - Strategic and Operational. On the respective pages, we show you how a BI tool can add immense value to your business in answering strategic and operational questions.