BusinessIntelligenceLandschaft

BusinessIntelligence (BI) refers to the technologies, applications and practices for the collection, integration, analysis, and presentation of business information. The purpose of BI is to support better business decision-making. BI systems provide historical, current and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of business intelligence systems include reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), analytics, data mining, complex event processing, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, predictive analytics, and prescriptive analytics. BI can also be used to measure employee performance, customer satisfaction, and market trends.

The concept of business intelligence emerged in the 1990s, building on earlier concepts of decision support systems and executive information systems. Early BI systems were often complex and expensive, requiring specialized IT skills to implement and maintain. However, with the advent of more user-friendly tools and cloud-based solutions, BI has become more accessible to businesses of all sizes.

Key components of a BI solution typically include a data warehouse or data lake to store and manage data, an extract, transform, load (ETL) or extract, load, transform (ELT) process to move data into the warehouse, a BI platform for analysis and reporting, and various user interfaces such as dashboards and reports. The ultimate goal of BI is to transform raw data into actionable insights that can drive strategic and tactical business decisions, leading to improved efficiency, profitability, and competitive advantage.