Business Intelligence - Information Technology

Business Intelligence (BI) is the journey of raw data from source systems being transformed into relevant, usable information and knowledge. By using Business Intelligence, organizations have the power to transform data from multiple sources into accurate and consumable information. The main purpose of Business Intelligence is to enable the end users to make more intelligence decisions from the extracted data quickly and confidently. Therefore, business performance will be enhanced and improved. This paper focused on the objectives and functional areas of Business Intelligence in organizations. By means of a literature review, the pith and core of what the writing says in regards to Business Intelligence and its part in choice making is systematically explored. The literature review confines itself to the past literature work done on the topic and hence the research is based on secondary sources like books, journal articles and other printed material online as well as offline.

Before the development of Business Intelligence, everyone had to follow their intuition and hope for the best in the decision-making process. By using Business Intelligence system, businesses can better their decision-making processes and customer service, save money, improve their planning and budgeting, predict the future outcomes, and achieve new heights. Waltz (2003) defined Business Intelligence as “acquisition, organization, analysis and reporting of the internal and external factors to enable decision makers to make faster, accurate and effective decisions to meet business objectives.”

Stackowiak et al. (2007) defined Business Intelligence as the process of taking large amounts of data, analyzing that data, and presenting a high-level set of reports that condense the essence of that data into the basis of business actions, enabling management to make fundamental daily business decisions. In today’s business environment, data is the most influential and important