What is Business intelligence ?

1. Improved Management Processes 

2. Planning, controlling, measuring, and applying changes that result in increased revenues and reduced costs. 

3. Improved business operations. 

4. Fraud detection, order processing, purchasing that results in increased revenues and reduced costs. 

5. Intelligent prediction of the future. 

⎯ In complex organizations, public or private, decisions are made on a continual basis. Such decisions may be more or less critical, have long- or short-term effects and involve people and roles at various hierarchical levels. 

⎯ The ability of these knowledge workers to make decisions, both as individuals and as a community, is one of the primary factors that influence the performance and competitive strength of a given organization. 

⎯ Most knowledge workers reach their decisions primarily using easy and intuitive methodologies, which take into account specific elements such as experience, knowledge of the application domain, and the available information. 

⎯ This approach leads to a stagnant decision-making style which is inappropriate for the unstable conditions determined by frequent and rapid changes in the economic environment. Indeed, decision-making processes within today’s organizations are often too complex and dynamic to be effectively dealt with through an intuitive approach and require instead a more rigorous attitude based on analytical methodologies and mathematical models. 

⎯ The importance and strategic value of analytics in determining competitive advantage for enterprises have been recently pointed out by several authors, as described in the references at the end of this chapter. Examples 1.1 and illustrate two highly complex decision-making processes in rapidly changing conditions.