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Business intelligence

Business intelligence (BI) leverages software and services to transform data into actionable insights that
inform an organization’s strategic and tactical business decisions. BI tools access and analyze data sets
and present analytical findings in reports, summaries, dashboards, graphs, charts and maps to provide
users with detailed intelligence about the state of the business.

The term business intelligence often also refers to a range of tools that provide quick, easy-to-digest
access to insights about an organization’s current state, based on available data (Pratt 2019). 

Examples of Business Intelligence

Data scientists and analysts:

Analysts are BI power users, and they use centralized company data paired with powerful analytics tools
to understand where opportunities for improvement exist and what strategic recommendations to
propose to company leadership.

Finance:

By blending financial data with operations, marketing and sales data, users can pull insights from which
decisions can be acted upon and understand factors that impact profit and loss.

Marketing:

Business intelligence tools help marketers track campaign metrics from a central digital space. BI
systems can provide real-time campaign tracking, measure each effort’s performance and plan for
future campaigns. This data gives marketing teams more visibility into overall performance and provides
contextual visuals for sharing with the company.

Sales:

Sales data analysts and operation managers often use BI dashboards and key performance indicators
(KPIs) for quick access to complex information like discount analysis, customer profitability and
customer lifetime value. Sales managers monitor revenue targets, sales rep performance along with the
status of the sales pipeline using dashboards with reports and data visualizations.

(Morris 2021)