Business Intelligence (BI) refers to skills, technologies, applications, security issues and practices used to assist companies in acquiring a better understanding of market behavior and provide business opportunities.

During the past decades, businesses had to collect data from non-automated sources and lacked the computing resources necessary to properly analyze data. As a result, companies often had to take business decisions primarily on the basis of intuition.

In modern companies, however, the use of standards, automation and specialized software, including analytical tools, allows large volumes of data to be collected, transformed and analyzed to greatly increase the speed at which  quality information becomes available for decision-making.

Business Intelligence Tools

Business intelligence tools are a type of application software designed to report, analyze and present data. The tools generally read data that have been previously stored, often, though not necessarily, in a data warehouse or data mart.

The key general categories of business intelligence tools are:

• Spreadsheets
• Reporting and querying software - are tools that extract, sort, summarize, and present selected data
• OLAP
• Digital Dashboards
• Data mining
• Predictive Analytics
• Business performance management

Except for spreadsheets, these tools are sold as standalone tools, suites of tools, components of ERP systems, or as components of software targeted to a specific industry. The tools are sometimes packaged into data warehouse appliances.