What is Business Intelligence?

Business intelligence (BI) is an umbrella term for the processes, technologies and strategies used to analyze and present insights derived from data, including everything from simple spreadsheets and graphs to customer satisfaction survey results and resources that make data usable. The overall goal of business intelligence is to help businesses make better and faster business decisions.

There are four key steps that BI follows to transform raw data into easy-to-digest insights for everyone in the organization to use. The first three - data collection, analysis and visualization - set the stage for the final decision-making step. Before using BI, businesses had to do much of their analysis manually, but BI tools automate many of the processes saving companies time and effort.