Buzzword: “Business Intelligence”

The term “Business Intelligence”, or just BI, has been used and abused so much that it has nearly as many personalities as Herschel Walker.  And that’s just within the context of the analytics and data management community, never mind the legions of people who associate it with corporate espionage.

Within the analytics world, BI has taken on (at least) the following definitions:

• The process of utilizing data for making better business decisions.  Sometimes used interchangeably with business or corporate performance management (originally coined by Gartner analyst Howard Dresner) 
• Reporting and dissemination of data from a data warehouse
• All systems required for collecting, integrating, cleansing, and reporting of data
• Software tools that extract data from a repository (database or otherwise) and present to a user in various formats
• Metrics used to measure business performance

So when someone uses the term BI, make sure you understand the context of the discussion (and the person’s background) so you’ll know which alter ego you’re conversing.

This entry was posted on 20. May 2008 at 15:26 and is filed under Industry Buzzwords. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.