What is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence (BI) is a complex term to describe. It is not a tool or a theory but a combination of methodologies, concepts, and technologies that enable you to get business value of raw data by transforming it into a format that can be used to do the required analysis and make decisions based on past trends.

To make it simple, let's start with a small example that illustrates the difference between using BI and not using it. We all know and play card games. Let's imagine that we have two players. Player number one is the smart BI guy, and player number two is the lazy, old-fashioned player. The old-fashioned player just plays cards based on his gut feeling, without trying to think or make use of the cards already played in the previous turns. He's actually not sure what the right card to play now is, or what cards he should play later on and in which sequence to win. He doesn't have the right tools and information to make his decision.

He is compared to the BI player who spends his time tracking all the cards played in the previous rounds. Then, he will try to predict and forecast the remaining cards for each player. He also spends time tracking the behavior of other players, their actions, and their impressions. This will help him predict their succeeding moves. He will start classifying the other players into categories such as a risky player who will rush to play his valuable cards in the early rounds, while other players will prefer to keep their valuable cards up to the end. The BI player simply uses historical information (past) to know what card to play now (current), and in the long run, he will build a strategy and vision on what cards he shall play in his upcoming turns to finally win the game.

Let's have a deeper look at our example to be able to define BI. BI means to extract historical information and then analyze it to help us decide what we shall do in the current situation and explore opportunities. In the long run, it will help build a strategy and vision by predicting and forecasting for the future.