Organization all over the world have seen the benefits of Business Intelligence (BI), and many are embracing it. Elena (2011) describes business intelligence as the computer-based techniques that are utilized in identifying, mining, and analyzing business data including incomes, costs, and sales revenue. On the other hand, Kumari (2013) views BI as an organization's ability to take all its capabilities and process and converting them into knowledge, resulting in the ideal information, meant for the ideal people at an ideal time and through the ideal channels. Kumari (2013) adds that this results in huge quantities of data that can be utilized by an organization to come up with new opportunities.
Business intelligence as a term was first used by Hans Peter Luhn, a researcher with IBM in an article published in 1958 (Elena, 2011). Despite growing in popularity over the past few years, BI has a fairly long history and is believed to have emerged from the Decision Support Systems (DSS) that were introduced in the 1960s. DSS in itself has its origins in computer-aided models that were developed to aid in planning and decision making (Elena, 2011).
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BI technologies facilitate the provision of historical, current as well as predictive information about an entity’s operations. It serves many functions, key among them being online analytical processing, reporting, prescriptive analytics, data mining and business performance management (Kumari, 2013). Within the BI environment, data is extracted from different sources after which is transformed before being loaded into an Enterprise Data Warehouse. Once in the Enterprise Data Warehouse, the data is utilized in report generation across the business (Kumari, 2013). BI success heavily relies on the quality of data. Data that is of poor quality negatively impacts business decision at different levels, and may, therefore, hinder the growth of a business entity.
References
Elena, C. (2011). Business intelligence. Journal of Knowledge Management, Economics and Information Technology , 1 (2), 1-12.
Kumari, N. (2013). Business intelligence in a nutshell. International journal of innovative research in computer and communication engineering , 1 (4), 969-975.
