BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE 2
Business Intelligence
Business intelligence is a set of strategies, technologies, information, and technical systems that
are used by a commercial organization to collect, analyze, present and disseminate business
information by the use of historical, current and predictive business operation views(Lim,
Chen& Chen, 2013). Business intelligence technologies help in running businesses through
information mining and analysis, management of business performance and benchmarking with
other firms in predictive analysis of business policies. It is, therefore, a crucial tool that helps in
making operational and strategic business decisions(Lim, Chen& Chen, 2013). Such decisions
range from product pricing, setting priorities, goals, and directions in a business plan. It is
necessary to incorporate business intelligence techniques in business because they combine both
external data from the market within which the firm operates and the internal firm operations
data to produce a complete picture of the business endeavor. It also gives a firm an insight into
new market opportunities and an efficient assessment of the demand and suitability of the
products that the firm deals in. Moreover, business intelligence also helps an organization to
discover and analyze different marketing strategies that can be used in different market segments
to improve the marginal productivity of the business(Lim, Chen& Chen, 2013).
Data analytics are the quantitative and qualitative techniques and processes that are used
to cleanse, transform and model business data so as to extract information (Sharda et al., 2014).
Data analytics help an entrepreneur to extract important information from data, which can be
used to make more informed and wise decisions and conclusions. Data analytics take different
facets and approaches depending on the type of data being analyzed. Data mining is one of the
data analytics technique in which data is modeled to be more predictive than descriptive, thus