What is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering storing and providing access to data to help enterprise users make better business decisions?

Business intelligence (BI) is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help enterprise users make better business decisions. BI applications include the activities of decision support systems, query and reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), statistical analysis, forecasting, and data mining.

Business Intelligence is a critical method to allow organizations to better understand their corporate data, make effective and informed business decisions, and generate increased revenue and business success. Business Intelligence implementations are challenging without the right insights, expertise, and methodology. Unfortunately, organizations are littered with failed or incomplete Business Intelligence projects.
InfoLabs’s focus and commitment to Business Intelligence will ensure that your implementation will be successful.
Creating a thorough, organized and well-documented set of procedures that can move project teams successfully through an entire system development lifecycle is not a simple matter. InfoLabs Method for BI Implementation meets your needs by incorporating the most desired methodology characteristics:

• BI specific
• Iterative
• Tied to business objectives
• Separate solution development and technical implementation for efficiency
• Well-designed framework, rich content and easy-to-use interface
• Modular and flexible
• Vendor independent
• Strong technology foundation
• Separate metadata path

Overview: I would like to explain in plain simple English and then dwell into details about this chapter.

Business Intelligence(BI):  You can call this a technology or an application or some practices to support better decission making. This  is data driven meaning  data that serves as an input to make decisions. so the system that makes these decisions is called Decision Support Systems( also called DSS).  Now when you combine the technology, applications for efficient way of reading this data for better understanding its behavior and trends, we call it Business Intelligence.

Technical Savvy definition for BI: Business intelligence (BI) is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help enterprise users make better business decisions. It is a simplification process of discovering information and analyzing that enables every decission maker in an organization to easily access, understand, analyze, collaborate and quickly act on it for better timely decission making.

BI is about extracting information from multiple sources of data, Synthesizing useful knowledge from collections of data, filtering irrelevant information
And setting the remaining information in the context of the business and its environment, discovering what plausible actions to be taken or decisions to be
Made at different times. To sum up it is a process of using information wisely and keeps you to up to date. And again it is a data driven Decision support System.

Relationship between Business Intelligence and Data warehousing

So why are we talking these two terms together? Are they inter-related? or they both same or what is their relationship?

Many of the tool vendors who sell their products or softwares call it business Intelligence software rather than Data warehousing software. so what is it? Business Intelligence is a term commonly associated with data warehousing. Business Intelligence is a generalized term where a company initiates various activities to gather today's market information which also includes about their competitor. Today's business Intelligence systems are contrasted to more classical way of information gathering in mining and crunching the data in the most optimal manner. In short we can say BI simplifies information discovery and analysis. In this way the company will have a competitive advantage of business and intelligently using the available data in strategic and effective decision making. it has the ability to bring disparate data under one roof  with a meaningful information and ready for analysis.

so what has Data warehousing to do with Business Intelligence?

Business intelligence usually refers to the information that is available for the enterprise to make decisions on. A data warehousing (or data mart) system is the backend, or the infrastructural, component for achieving business intelligence. Business intelligence also includes the insight gained from doing data mining analysis, as well as unstructured data (thus the need fo content management systems).

Let me give the path of Data warehousing. All the source data from disparate sources are used to load/Stage data. Different sources can be flat files, another database or some other process. The starting point of the Data warehouse should extract the data in order to load into its environment.This is extracting. This data may not be the expected format or size. your business demands are different or your organization business requirements are different. So the business process has to modify the data or better word is to transform the incoming data to meet requirements and objectives. This is called Transformation. Once every slicing and dicing of the data is done along with applied business rules, this data is ready for loading into the target tables. This process is called Loading. So overall till now we have done Extraction, Transformation and Loading. In short we call this ETL. There are lot of tools available in today's market which does help in achieving the ETL process. Once this data is loaded in to the database, this is ready for next processing. We call that database as Data warehouse database. The next process could be building of datamarts or directly reporting from it. There are lot of tools/software available for reporting/analysis. Some call it business reporting or analysis tool. But if you see the whole process has intelligence involved in business. we can call this or the gurus call it Data warehousing and the system involved from end to end is called business intelligence system.

To sum up the whole BI Systems or DW process. it is the ETL plus Reporting which is called the Data warehousing. Now having read this you should have an idea of what is the whole business involved in Data warehousing. In my next chapter I'll discuss the concepts and terminology used in Data warehousing.

One line difference between Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence:

Data warehousing using ETL jobs, will store data in a meaningful form. However, in order to query the data for reporting, forecasting, business intelligence tools were born.

Which is the technology used for gathering storing and analyzing data for better business decision?

Which of the following techniques and applications are used for storing and managing data to help companies to make better business decisions?

What is a set of applications technologies and processes for gathering storing analyzing and accessing data to help users make better decisions?

What areas of business are impacted most through business intelligence?