Business Intelligence from wikipedia

The term business intelligence (BI) dates to 1958.It refers to technologies, applications, and practices for the collection, integration, analysis, and presentation of business information and also sometimes to the information itself. The purpose of business intelligence is to support better business decision making. D. J. Power explains in "A Brief History of Decision Support Systems,"
BI describes a set of concepts and methods to improve business decision making by using fact-based support systems. BI is sometimes used interchangeably with briefing books, report and query tools and executive information systems. Business Intelligence systems are data-driven DSS.
BI systems provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations, most often using data that has been gathered into a data warehouse or a data mart and occasionally working from operational data. Software elements support reporting, interactive "slice-and-dice" pivot-table analyses, visualization, and statistical data mining. Applications tackle sales, production, financial, and many other sources of business data for purposes that include, notably, business performance management.

BI technologies

For a BI technology system to work effectively, a company should have a secure computer system which can specify different levels of user access to the data 'warehouse,' depending on whether the user is a junior staffer, a manager, or an executive. As well, a BI system should have sufficient data capacity and a plan for how long data will be stored (data retention). Analysts should set benchmark and performance targets for the system.
Business intelligence analysts have developed software tools to gather and analyze large quantities of unstructured data, such as production metrics, sales statistics, attendance reports, and customer attrition figures. Each BI vendor typically develops Business intelligence systems differently, to suit the demands of different sectors (e.g., retail companies, financial services companies, etc.).
Business intelligence software and applications include a range of tools. Some BI applications are used to analyze performance, projects, or internal operations, such as AQL - Associative Query Logic, Scorecarding, Business activity monitoring, Business Performance Management and Performance Measurement, Business Planning, Business Process Re-engineering, Competitive Analysis, User/End-user Query and Reporting, Enterprise Management systems, Executive Information Systems (EIS), Supply Chain Management/Demand Chain Management, and Finance and Budgeting tools.
Other BI technologies are used to store and analyze data, such as Data mining (DM), Data Farming, and Data warehouses; Decision Support Systems (DSS) and Forecasting; Document warehouses and Document Management; Knowledge Management; Mapping, Information visualization, and Dashboarding; Management Information Systems (MIS); Geographic Information Systems (GIS); Trend Analysis; Software as a service (SaaS) Business Intelligence offerings (On Demand) — which is similar to traditional BI solutions, but software is hosted for customers by a provider; Online analytical processing (OLAP) and multidimensional analysis, sometimes called "Analytics" (based on the "hypercube" or "cube"); Real time business intelligence; Statistics and Technical Data Analysis; Web Mining; Text mining; and Systems intelligence.
Other BI applications are used to analyze or manage the "human" side of businesses, such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Marketing tools and Human Resources applications.