Business Intelligence Software and BI application

What is Business Intelligence?

In 1958 a researcher from IBM introduced the term Business Intelligence along with its interpretation as "the ability to apprehend the interrelationships of presented facts in such a way as to guide action towards a desired goal."

Business intelligence (more commonly referred as BI) refers to an application or a set of applications implemented by skills and technologies to help an organization to get better insight of commercial context. It may also refer to the collected set of information inclusive of statistical data.

Warehouses and Data mart are often used for data gathering by BI applications. It is not all the time that all BI Applications require a data warehouse.

How Business Intelligence is so useful?

BI technologies in combination of software application provide an organization a predictive layout of whole day to day functioning. It also provides current, legend and business operation information to the management.

Most common functional area of business support system :

* Reporting
* OLAP
* Analysis
* Benchmarking
* Text mining
* Data mining
* Business performance management
* Predictive analysis

Also, as a part of technicality, some large scale industries use their own platform to create the application which small and medium scale organization use .net framework library to create such applications.

Many changes has recently been done in form of architecture used for such applications. Now a days in 2.0 version of application SOA service oriented architecture, which enables for a flexible, composable and adaptive middleware.

The main aim behind Business Intelligence software is to provide an organization better planning and decision making. Thus BI Systems are sometimes referred to a Decision Support System (DSS). DSS is widely used by top level management who deals with MIS.