Business intelligence (BI) is a technology-driven process for analyzing data and delivering actionable information that helps executives, managers and workers make informed business decisions. As part of the BI process, organizations collect data from internal IT systems and external sources, prepare it for analysis, run queries against the data and create data visualizations, BI dashboards and reports to make the analytics results available to business users for operational decision-making and strategic planning.

The ultimate goal of BI initiatives is to drive better business decisions that enable organizations to increase revenue, improve operational efficiency and gain competitive advantages over business rivals. To achieve that goal, BI incorporates a combination of analytics, data management and reporting tools, plus various methodologies for managing and analyzing data.

How the business intelligence process works

A business intelligence architecture includes more than just BI software. Business intelligence data is typically stored in a data warehouse built for an entire organization or in smaller data marts that hold subsets of business information for individual departments and business units, often with ties to an enterprise data warehouse. In addition, data lakes based on Hadoop clusters or other big data systems are increasingly used as repositories or landing pads for BI and analytics data, especially for log files, sensor data, text and other types of unstructured or semistructured data.