Business Intelligence and Your Bottom Line

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Working Past Some Myths to Realities of BI

The term business intelligence and its acronym BI are so pervasive in today’s data-intensive lexicon that it’s a challenge to know just what to make of it.

If you add in all the new trendy terminology such as business process management, data mining, data warehousing, business process automation, decision support systems, query and reporting systems, enterprise performance management, executive information systems, business activity monitoring, modeling and visualization, and so forth, your head can start spinning.

Here is a workable definition of BI that was provided in a Technology Evaluation report from a January 10, 2005, Technology Evaluation Centers article by Mukhles Zaman entitled, “Business Intelligence: Its Ins and Outs”: “BI is neither a product nor a system. It is an umbrella term that combines architectures, applications, and databases. It enables the real-time, interactive access, analysis, and manipulation of information, which provides the business community with easy access to business data.”

I will attempt to dispel some myths and offer some guidance on how to make the right purchasing and implementation decisions for your business.

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