A software way to analyze your sells

Business intelligence is a term that refers to company that are aiming to get the best knowledge from their data, using it to have a better relationship with customers, to get new ones and eventually sell more.

Business intelligence is a Computer-based techniques used in spotting, digging-out, and analyzing 'hard' business data, such as sales revenue by products or departments or associated costs and incomes. Objectives of a BI exercise include:

• understanding of a firm's internal and external strengths and weaknesses,

• understanding of the relationship between different data for better decision making,

• detection of opportunities for innovation, and

• cost reduction and optimal deployment of resources. 

The goal is to understand the past performance, to give predictions on the future. Concepts related to that are: reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, and predictive analytics. 

Even if it has great clamor for present companies, it is an old concept, developed in 1958 by an IBM researcher Hans Peter Luhn.

Considering the huge amount of data required, a datwarehouse or a data mart are generally required.

A 2009 Gartner paper predicted these developments in business intelligence market . 

• Because of lack of information, processes, and tools, through 2012, more than 35 percent of the top 5,000 global companies will regularly fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business and markets.

• By 2012, business units will control at least 40 percent of the total budget for business intelligence.

• By 2010, 20 per cent of organizations will have an industry-specific analytic application delivered via software as a service as a standard component of their business intelligence portfolio.

• In 2009, social software with business intelligence platform capabilities.

• By 2012, one-third of analytic applications applied to business processes will be delivered through coarse-grained application mashups.

Refences:

Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_intelligence

Business Dictionary at http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/business-intelligence-BI.html

Gartner at http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=856714