Business intelligence

The term ‘business intelligence’ is relatively new, but the ideas and concepts behind it stem from the drive towards enterprise-wide information, executive dashboards and analytics, a process that began more than two decades ago. Put simply, business intelligence technologies help people to understand data more quickly so that they can make faster, more informed decisions.

Business intelligence-based tools, systems and working practices are storming up the corporate agenda, fuelled by the desire of organisations to derive more value from the large investments they have already made in customer relationship management (CRM), supply-chain management, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and enterprise-portal solutions.