Business Intelligence, also known as business intelligence, is the general term used to refer to a collection of insights, assessment, and analysis regarding the factors that contribute to the success or failure of a company. It is the analysis of such factors that provides a company with the strategic knowledge needed to make sound business decisions. The term Business Intelligence was first used by The World Wide Web’s pioneers, Tim Berners-Lee and Eric Schmidt, when they created the first browser based on hypertext and web networking technology. Today, this term has become much more than a simple jargon used by techno geeks. Today it is a common term used in all walks of life and business for the purposes of understanding, predicting, managing, and enjoying the benefits of change.
- The term business intelligence covers many things.
- It is not just a set of technical tools used to analyze and evaluate the performance of a business.
- Nor does it encompass purely quantitative things such as market share statistics and profit margins.
- No, business intelligence goes beyond these basic measurement and analysis.
- Instead, it focuses on the study of behavior and the analysis of trends in that behavior.
- This is done through the accumulation and compilation of massive amounts of information from wide ranging sources – both human and nonhuman.
Another key aspect of business intelligence is the process of what is called market research. Market research seeks to understand the behavior of buying decisions across broad and deep sections of the buying market. It also seeks to understand the purchasing behavior of large and small businesses across broad and deep sections of the buying market. All of this is done to build and maintain an understanding of how business intelligence can be best applied in specific circumstances.
Beyond market intelligence is business insight. Again, this broader concept covers a much wider range of activities. Business insight refers to the ability to see clearly the larger picture, to see clearly the entire context in which an event is taking place. Business intelligence analyzes such things as how customers are behaving online, how employees are behaving in the workplace, what customers are asking for, what employees are buying from customers, and what customers are not buying from customers.
Beyond these core areas, there are many more areas of business intelligence where data is accumulated and analyzed. These areas include social intelligence, market intelligence, travel behavior, consumer behavior, and so forth. All of this is combined and studied to try to understand the why and how of a given event. The goal of business intelligence isn’t just to find out what happened, but to find out why it happened. To that end, many organizations are working very hard to gather up and analyze data, develop intelligence studies, and organize that data in ways that make sense to all involved.
The question is do business intelligence professionals really work? The answer is that yes, they do. Business intelligence professionals are gaining a much needed understanding of the business that surrounds them and are applying that knowledge to help their client companies achieve their business goals. With today’s competitive business environment business intelligence is playing a critical role in the success or failure of a company.