Just What Is Business Intelligence?

Business intelligence (BI) is defined in many ways. Often, vendors will craft the definition of BI to show their tools in the best possible light. We like to look at BI as a an approach to presenting business data in ways that allows executives to query and manipulate that data to gain business insight needed to make the decisions needed to run the day-to-day business in a (hopefully!) profitable manner.

BI data is displayed in a fashion that is appropriate to each type of user; that is, analysts will be able to drill into detailed data; executives will see timely summaries, and middle managers will see data presented at the level of detail that they need to make good business decisions. BI uses cubes, rather ...

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