# 1 Define Business Intelligence (BI). Explain why BI is critical

to modern Business.

Business Intelligence can be defined as, ‘‘a conceptual framework for

decision support. It combines architecture, databases (or data

warehouse), analytical tools and applications’’

In simple words Business Intelligence refers to the system that

supports better business decision making by providing historical,

current, and predictive views of business operations.

Until now, it has been impossible for organizations to provide

management with a complete summary of business activities every

day but the application of Business Intelligence in the modern business

has changed the way, an information flows within organizations.

Several Business Intelligence applications which have contributed

towards the success of modern business are:

Real Time Reporting

BI helps the organizations to make decisions based on live data

and it is also used to receive up-to-date reports with just a click

of a button.

Efficient Decision Making

BI helps to produce reports in a PC format that improves end-

user analysis and makes it use easy for the business houses. It

also publishes reports that are specific to a distribution list or

group.

Increase Productivity

BI adds to the productivity by reducing the IT department

workload and empowering business users.

Simple & Rapid Deployment

It is very simple to employ BI system because of its seamless

integration with Excel which makes it easy to understand for

business houses. BI has also made it easy to use graphical

interface for organizations

New Publishing Capabilities

BI supports scheduling the execution and distribution of various

adhoc reports and publishes reports to the web in PDF & HTML

format.

Collecting complete information

BI facilitates modern companies to collect complete information

from various parties like Customers, Stakeholders and

Competitors by offering the application of major theories like

online transaction processing systems (OLTP) and online

analytical processing (OAP)

CONCLUSION:

Apart from the above discussed importance of BI in developing modern

business, some of the other benefits of BI are time savings, improved

strategies, improved customer service, increased revenue, more

efficient process and cost savings. As the modern Business Intelligence

systems are built on a single architecture, the single and complete

data model ensures that the organization get better information out of

BI system and also benefit from consistent, accurate, and enterprise

data. Thus we can conclude that Business Intelligence is critical to

modern business.