What is Business Intelligence?????

Business Intelligence (BI) helps business people make more informed decisions by providing them timely, data-driven answers to their business questions. BI analyzes data stored in data warehouses, operational databases, and/or ERP systems and transforms it into attractive and easy to understand dashboards and reports. BI delivers the insight needed to make strategic planning decisions, improve operational efficiencies, and optimize business processes.

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 applications can be:

Mission-critical and integral to an enterprise's operations or occasional to meet a special requirement
Enterprise-wide or local to one division, department, or project
Centrally initiated or driven by user demand
This term was used as early as September, 1996, when a Gartner Group report said:

By 2000, Information Democracy will emerge in forward-thinking enterprises, with Business Intelligence information and applications available broadly to employees, consultants, customers, suppliers, and the public. The key to thriving in a competitive marketplace is staying ahead of the competition. Making sound business decisions based on accurate and current information takes more than intuition. Data analysis, reporting, and query tools can help business users wade through a sea of data to synthesize valuable information from it - today these tools collectively fall into a category called "Business Intelligence."