Business Intelligence (BI) refers to computer-based techniques used in spotting, digging-out, and analyzing business data, such as sales revenue by products and/or departments or associated costs and incomes. [1] BI technologies provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of Business Intelligence technologies are reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, and predictive analytics. (Source: Wikipedia)
Business Intelligence has been the highest investment priority for CIOs in the previous years. As traditional BI matures, new technologies emerge that allow easier consumption and more pervasive use of business data.
A 2009 Gartner paper predicted these developments in the business intelligence market:
- Because of lack of information, processes, and tools, through 2012, more than 35 percent of the top 5,000 global companies will regularly fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business and markets.
- By 2012, business units will control at least 40 percent of the total budget for business intelligence.
- By 2010, 20 per cent of organizations will have an industry-specific analytic application delivered via software as a service as a standard component of their business intelligence portfolio.
- In 2009, collaborative decision making will emerge as a new product category that combines social software with business intelligence platform capabilities.
- By 2012, one-third of analytic applications applied to business processes will be delivered through coarse-grained application mashups.
This blog provides some insights into latest thinking on BI and provides some further resources for the practitioner.