Enterprise planning often requires proactive analysis and trend watching to keep ahead of the competition. As a way to compare processes and ROI along a timeline, businesses use a set of applications that has come to be known as business intelligence (BI). It's a fitting term, since when used correctly, the various processes allowed through these applications certainly make enterprises and their executives seem more intelligent than the competition.
This SearchSAP.com guide will explain how and why business intelligence is used -- providing expert advice, decision making analysis, case studies and business intelligence tools. Read on to find out how to make your own business processes more intelligent!
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Gartner Research: "If you ask organizations what they want to use BI for, better decision-making is the top answer. The pressure from cost cutting and compliance has put a greater focus on BI, but businesses are still using it very tactically. Successful organizations realize that having a real vision for BI is the key to business performance and they use information as a resource implemented in their business culture."
-- Frank Buytendijk, research vice-president, Gartner Research
Glossary Definition: Business intelligence (BI) (SearchSAP.com, powered by Whatis.com)
 You'll find much more expert advice on business intelligence in our Ask the Expert feature. If you're making business intelligence decisions, then you'll love the advice from our resident expert Jay Narayanan. Click here to browse BI Q and A or below for a sampling of Jay's expert advice... |
As a business intelligence application, a decision support system (DSS) is a computer program that analyzes business data and presents it so that making business decisions is easier for the user. As opposed to an operational application, which collects data over the normal course of business, business intelligence is an informational application, meaning it gathers data like comparative and projected figures.
Query, reporting and analysis applications provide end users with mechanisms for designing and distributing reports, building decision support systems (DSS) and executive information systems (EIS), or for performing online analytical processing (OLAP) against multidimensional databases.
* Don't miss the SAP BW companion guide -- click here to read more *
What is BI?
