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What is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence refers to the methods and technologies that businesses use to gather and analyze raw data to help companies make business decisions. Business intelligence is not a new concept – the term was first introduced in the late 1980s but didn’t gain widespread usage until the early 2000s. In the beginning, the IT department would run complex business reports and share them with top executives. Now, thanks to a wide range of business intelligence software, any business user can run and access the information themselves in a quick manner.


Business Intelligence software gives businesses a way to keep all their data in one place where it can be viewed and combined into reports. Rather than each department and functional area keeping its own databases and documents, business intelligence software collects all of that information and combines it in one system where it can easily be accessed, organized, and used to make business decisions.


Business Intelligence is often called an “umbrella term” and refers to the technologies and activities that extract meaning out of large sets of data. BI activities include querying, reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP) and data mining. Whether you’re sorting columns in spreadsheets or trolling through terabytes of Big Data using sophisticated software, some basic background information is helpful.

BI Blog

2015: The Year of the Data Scientist

2015 Year of Data Scientist

Data science is no longer a niche area. When I first told my friends that I worked with Data Scientists two years ago, their reaction was ‘who?’ Today it is a widely understood and accepted term. In fact, HBR described it as the ‘sexiest job in the world’ as far back as 2012. So what […]

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The 10 Most Important BI Stories of 2014

Top BI Stories of 2014

2014 was a big year for business intelligence. From the emergence of new technologies to game-changing mergers and acquisitions in the industry, there was no shortage of compelling developments in the field. With the New Year now underway, we took a look back at some of the most compelling and widely shared business intelligence stories […]

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How BI Is Like Fried Chicken

Why BI Is Like Fried Chicken

One of my colleagues made an offhand comment the other day that stuck with me. We were talking about dashboards, and he said (paraphrasing here) that dashboards can be bad for users. Given that our employer makes and markets products for creating BI dashboards, his statement bordered on treason. But then he went on to […]

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Governed Data Discovery: What You Need to Know

Governed Data Discovery

Governed Data Discovery is one of the trending buzzword of 2014. The term made its debut in Gartner’s 2014 Magic Quadrant Report. Gartner first popularized the term data discovery  and now is adding governed to the term. While it forms a great acronym, GDD, the clear question here is what does Governed Data Discovery actually mean? […]

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