What is Business Intelligence?

In the simplest terms Business Intelligence is reporting.  Within any business people rely on information systems to record the workings of the business.  Information about our customers, our vendors, and our interactions with them, or transactions is all captured with these wonderful machines we call computers.  

So we are pouring all of this information into these machines, capturing every move we make, and now it is time to get the information back out.  The problem is we don’t want the information to come out the way we put it in.  What we want is a chart or a graph, or a simple table that tells us what’s going on, where our successes are and where things need to improve.   This is business intelligence.  Extracting from the mountains of information we have captured, the essence of what’s occurring to report status and allow us to make decisions about the future of our business.

If that were the whole picture then there would not be much to talk about.  As it turns out, we want access to this information differently depending on the situation.  Some situations require a printed report, others call for a highly summarized view that guides us to more detail to isolate issues.  Others still require an extremely flexible interaction that facilitates what-if analysis and allows us to manipulate information in any manner we see fit. 

In summary, Business Intelligence is the methodologies and technologies of providing businesses information from all of the data they have collected.  In the next, entry I will cover a number of typical business problems and discuss how they are approached with Business Intelligence technologies.

What’s coming Up:

•              What is the problem we are trying to solve
•               Why  you can’t have that report right now
•                Introducing the Oracle BI Enterprise Edition Platform