ABSTRACT
Business Intelligence (BI) deals with various types of technologies and applications for collecting, recording, summarizing, analyzing, and proving access to data to help corporate managers. BI application comprises Online analytical processing, advanced analytics, corporate performance management (portals, scorecards, and dashboards), data warehouse and data marts, and data sources. The main purpose of BI is to help corporate managers in better decision-making. BI allows organizations to access information that is critical to the success of the functional areas of the organization, such as finance, human resource, R&D, marketing and sale, and finally organization at large. Effective utilization of BI in an organization will enrich business with increased useful data, help market positioning, provide great insights into industry trends, facilitate strategic decision-making models, and maintain competitive advantage. BI also helps companies to focus on the customers’ buying behavior and better control over their processes and standard operating procedures; to improve organizational efficiency; and to access data in real-time. Therefore, companies are investing their valuable money, effort, and time into BI. In this chapter, we will explain the concepts of BI, its components, emergence of BI, benefits of BI, and we will also explain why BI is important for the success of any organization.
